Bird View! by Diya Homsi
Homs / El- Hamidiya – 22 June 2013
Click on the image to view a slideshow of photographs by Diya Homsi
Diya Homsi (22, Homs) chose to become a professional photographer after the revolution started. He has been living with other activists and Free Syrian Army fighters for the past one year and five months in the Old City. He is one of the main photographers for the Lens of Homsi and participated in the TAKWEEN training programme.
From the spark of the first demonstrations in Homs until the regime’s savage war against civilians that destroyed most of the city, Diya has been capturing every little detail of his hometown. Deserted areas, clashes, and death call upon him. He frames all those moments in black and white hoping to portray the memories of an isolated town.
Diya had a desire to be a designer when he was seventeen, but he never imagined that he might become a professional photographer. He yearned to visualize his ideas to share them with the world, and started to improve his design skills until a friend introduced him to photography. “At the beginning, I worked hard to buy a camera that I could manually adjust to the lighting and conditions of the place. I started to take photos of the city, planes, nature, flowers, and insects,” Diya says.
When the revolution started, Diya dedicated his talent to what he believed in, knowing that his will contributes to informing the world about what is happening in a country where pictures were confiscated. “I was with a group of people who went to a demonstration from Khaled Ibn al-Waleed Mosque. I couldn’t believe that we really did it because of the large groups of shabbiha and mercenaries that were outside”, Diya says, recalling one of the first demonstrations in the city. “My main concern was to find a way to inform the whole world of what the authorities were doing,” he adds. However, photographing the events was not as much a cause for concern as publishing the pictures. He says, “publishing and circulating the photos through social media networks or by sending them to news channels laid the biggest challenge before us because of the major risks it involved. Many activists were arrested because of that,” Diya explains.
With time, the situation escalated and the risks became higher. “I had to keep doing what I started,” Diya says, and “even when I felt overwhelmed by the reality of events, I used to regain my motivation when I saw a photo I took or a video I filmed being published on a satellite channel. It made me feel like I contributed to spreading the message of a society that was chained with silence for decades.”
Homs has been under siege for more than eighteen months, during which time Diya has never stopped looking. He has never stopped being connected to the sound of the shutter’s click and being grabbed by unexpected events that inspire his passion and have a strong impact on him. He develops a special relationship to the hidden stories behind the images. After all, all photographs have untold stories.
The photo of the “Brave Bird” has always captured Diya’s thoughts. Diya recalls the day he took the photo: “The siege of Homs had already started with clashes and fights reaching their peak, when I was walking around with my camera but without solid plans, trying to allow the camera to call its own shots.” He says, “A Free Syrian Army fighter saw me and asked me to go with him to the front lines to help him monitor the regime’s soldiers’ movements with my zoom lens through a hole in the wall.” Diya ended up in a dark room focusing his camera’s lens through the hole. “During those scary and tense moments while my finger was shivering on the shutter, a bird emerged inside my frame and landed on the rubble outside, only for a few seconds, but it was enough for me to take a photo of that brave creature.” Afterward, Diya left the place looking at the photo and thinking, “How is it possible that I go to an unusual place to photograph an unusual event, and then find myself capturing something completely different? A bird emerges within all this chaos to steal a place for itself in a few seconds.”
With the start of the military operations and the bombing and shelling of civilian neighbourhoods, Diya joined a team of photography activists and started a Facebook page called “Lens Young Homsi”, which is dedicated to publishing pictures from Homs on daily basis. Later on, Diya started his own Facebook page, on which he publishes his pictures in black and white.
Although Diya is as brave as that little bird, he cannot escape the siege of his hometown nor the charm of his camera. More accurately, he never intended to leave. He is in Homs, holding his camera and depicting the suffering of the besieged people of the city: “I take photos of children in the streets, photos of a man using wood to cook for his family, or photos of the destruction caused by rocket and aerial bombardments.” Diya assembles the daily tales hoping that his photos will find their colours in the eyes of their beholders.
All rights to the photographs belong to Diya Homsi. Please contact him via his Facebook account for terms of use.
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