The World Is My Playground

A Traveller’s Record of Syrian Monuments Before the War

In April, 2009, Peter Aaron, a veteran architectural photographer, went on vacation with his family, to Syria. It was about one year into President Obama’s first term, long before the name ISIS was broadly known. Aaron brought along a Canon 5D that he had modified several years earlier, removing the infrared coating on its lenses. Shooting with this camera would render blue skies in dark black and foliage in milky white, but he would gain a great level of detail and contrast in the gray-and-earth-colored stones of Syria’s buildings. His wife, a writer, professor, and history enthusiast, came up with the itinerary.

Aaron’s images from that trip amount to a staggering chronicle of ancient and historic monuments, many of which have since been badly damaged or completely destroyed by the war’s many belligerents.

Originally intended as a kind of personal travelogue, these photographs now carry the weight of historical record. As the gruesome civil war continues—and intensifies—they serve as a quiet reminder of Syria’s recent past.

A Storm Chaser’s Unforgiving View of the Sky

We are changing the face of the sky. And we are altering its mood; scientists hesitate to link specific storms to global warming, but it’s clear that, on the whole, climate change is making extreme-weather events more powerful and, perhaps, more common. When we look up, increasingly the face we see is ours. In the photographer Camille Seaman’s cloudscapes, it’s difficult to not also see humankind’s self-portrait: potent, defiant, unforgiving. Clouds always tell a true story, Ralph Abercromby said, and more than ever the story they tell is the story of ourselves. Where that story will take us is difficult to read.

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