Whether he is portraying a group of old men playing cards at the Thieves’ Market in Damascus or a girl drawing water from the tranquil blue Euphrates, Mohamad Al Roumi shows us a side of Syria that is far from the images we have got used to seeing in the news.
His exhibition at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Contrast Syria, combines photographs of the nomadic tribes of the northeastern steppes from the 1970s to 1990s with images of workers in the deprived fringes of Damascus and Aleppo in the years before the war broke out. A metal worker sweats in a city foundry in one picture; Bedouin men sew goat-hair strips together to make a wedding tent in another.
The portraits of both ways of life seem nostalgic from today’s perspective. The labourers may be poor, but there is a peacefulness in the calm focus on their work. Many of these people have now escaped the horrors of the war to make their way to Germany as refugees.
A painter by training, Al Roumi was born in 1945 and grew up in the multi-ethnic Tell Abyad district of Mesopotamian Syria. He now lives in Paris but continues to focus his work on Syria.
• Contrast Syria: Photographs by Mohamad Al Roumi, Museum of Islamic Art, Pergamon, Berlin, until 9 October
