Jonathan Sa'adah

Return to Damascus: A Personal Journey offers an intimate photographic exploration of one of the world’s most ancient cities, captured through the lens of personal memory and family history. Jonathan Sa’adah’s black-and-white photographs document Damascus in the year 2000, creating a visual narrative that bridges past and present through the streets, markets, and sacred spaces his father once knew as a child.

These 88 black and white photographs aren’t asking you to visit Damascus—they’re asking you to consider issues of resilience, community, and cultural continuity. They’re asking you in turn to see our own Western cities with fresh eyes: What did we lose in our pursuit of efficiency? What did we abandon in our quest for individual freedom? What can Damascus teach us about building communities that survive?

Jonathan Sa’adah’s photographic career has spanned more than five decades, during which a complete revolution has taken place in photographic methods and techniques. While today he embraces digital photography and is an expert in the most contemporary, high-tech methods of photographic reproduction and printing, his early years were spent not only in darkrooms, perfecting the making of photographic prints by hand, but in learning traditional processes such as gum-bichromate and paladium printing. His patient dedication resulted in mastery of his craft, but his work has always been informed by his artist’s eye and his deep sensitivity to the people and situations he photographs.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that he was drawn to the work of Gildas Berthelot, which combines long experience in traditional furniture-making with a uniquely modern aesthetic, and innovative sculptural techniques. As an artist and craftsman himself, Sa’adah appreciated the intense, physically-demanding, and astounding transformation of flat planks of wood into fantastic forms that he observed in his neighbor’s sculpture studio. As a documentary photographer with a lifelong interest in portraiture, art, and the creative process, he undertook the creation of the series of photographs which are presented in this book, and were part of a joint exhibition with Gildas Berthelot in Montreal in October, 2019. The accompanying interviews with both photographer and sculptor further illuminate their approaches and their work for the rest of us, who can be inspired by the creative spirits of both of these remarkable artists.

An unvarnished, deeply human view of the period from 1968 to 1975 in richly detailed, observant images that have poignant resonance with the present. Capturing the tipping point when television was just beginning to establish its advertising and journalistic muscle, and corporate power was starting to erode centuries of rural, local identity, the photographs show economic and social dislocation, student and faculty opposition to the Vietnam War, and idealistic young people going back to the land. They delineate a fractured society, in which a threatened younger generation challenged a political elite who were already placing the footings for endless war.