I went to Mosul last December. The city, liberated from ISIS during the summer, was then quiet and it was surreal walk safely where I witnessed danger and explosions. A vast portion of it was razed to the ground. After covering many conflicts, the heartbreaking and silent devastation in West Mosul hit me particularly hard.
I felt a quiet respect toward those mangled buildings, abused and betrayed by the same humanity who built and cared for them. Looking at those houses cleaved apart, I often thought of their past: what was life like inside them before a weapon turned them into rubble? And would they ever go back to their original task of hospitality?
I worked on this series with a field camera. The set up, usually reserved to the rarefied world of architecture photography, eliminates converging verticals and I wanted to use that to give to the images a feeling of quiet timelessness which clashes with the overwhelming destruction in Western Mosul.
