A Small Forest on the Other Side

Eyad Abou Kasem  |  The Arab Documentary Photography Program  |  2015  |  Syria
I’m from Damascus, Syria and in the summer of 2015 I left for Europe, traveling overland to Turkey, crossing to Greece by boat. I traveled light, with my camera and 7 rolls of Tri-X film. From there I made my way up to Germany, where I applied for asylum and was assigned to a refugee camp in Würzburg in the state of Bavaria. I made the photographs in this series with a small digital camera once in Germany, and it is a sort of photo diary in which I try to describe my feelings about the situation I’ve found myself in as a new refugee, which maybe also reflects the experience of refugees in general. Leaving my country at war to come live in a refugee camp, I’m full of conflicting feelings I’ve never felt before. They’re unsettling and weigh heavily, and are sometimes even absurd, starting small, with the upsetting conditions I find myself in, and finishing with my foggy future.