Rising Among Ruins, Dancing Amid Bullets. Photographs by Maryam Ashrafi. Published by HEMERIA.
Rising Among Ruins, Dancing Amid Bullets is, perhaps, a terrible name. It implies a felicity inappropriate to war, but the pages of the book show us that that is both true and false. We see soldiers playing volleyball, we see them contemplating chess moves and enjoying books. We see them dancing and laughing and taking care that their souls remain in good working order, in humanitarian condition. But, most of all we see these soldiers as a community not bent on whose role is what, but rather that all roles are one. Preservation. A future. The vitality of children and their right to play and grow and feel assurance in the health of their siblings and parents.
At more than 300 photographs one might think, Well, that’s just too many. Though when we page through this book again and again, we can’t find one we’d discard. We might discard the text. There is too much of it. Though, we’d keep the photographer’s Q&A. But the images are real, candid, and unable to leave the kernel of the mind’s seed, but rather they issue forth and grow and imbed and lay low and come back again.
