Bachar Azmeh: A Syrian Photographer’s Artistic Lens

Bachar Azmeh is a Syrian entrepreneur and photographer. He has been a consultant engineer and hospital planner since 1972, and heads a private consulting office in Damascus. In that capacity, he has worked in several countries around the world.

Azmeh is also an avid photographer, an activity that allows him to express his unique vision of reality. A central part of that vision is his capacity to find beauty in everyday objects and situations.

As a passionate lover of his country’s culture and traditions, Azmeh suffers the travails his country is now going through. It is his love and concern for his country that has led him into a voyage of discovery and appreciation for small things. He has documented his vision in thousands of photographs.

The Syrian photographer searches for a poetic and loving world that merges with the accumulated relationship between vision and view, and throughout the conspiracy between Azmeh’s eye and his camera the two lenses unite to bring into being his personal views in the captured photographs.

Azmeh says about himself, “As a person, and in photography, I have always tried to search and find beauty in neglected unnoticed objects/views we daily encounter but rarely notice, and have always tried to put my vision in context -whether social or environmental- and tried to emphasize contrast in life as something positive “

Azmeh’s photographs have been shown in several Syrian towns, in Amman (Jordan), Cleveland and NYC (the U.S). In the autumn of 2009, he held his first solo exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Damascus. His first US exhibition entitled “Another window to the blue” was hosted by the Middle Eastern American Center of the City University of New York in 2014.

Although he lived most of the time in Damascus, Azmeh travels frequently overseas, particularly to the United States, where part of his family lives. His photographs are in private collections and are part of the modern art photographic collection at Syria’s Ministry of Culture.

Mother Theresa has said: “The Lord likes small things best, especially those done with love.” The work of Bachar Azmeh is the perfect embodiment of her saying.

All photos below by Bachar Azmeh:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA partially veiled -- OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA the fortune teller OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA red eye texture

Dr. Cesar Chelala is a co-winner of the 1979 Overseas Press Club of America award for the article “Missing or Disappeared in Argentina: The Desperate Search for Thousands of Abducted Victims.”