Category: Civil Wars

Bone-white and fractured, a cluster of human skulls fills the frame at Choeung Ek, the infamous killing fields, photographed in 1981. The close focus is unforgiving: empty eye sockets, broken teeth, and pitted surfaces are rendered with stark clarity, turning remains into a silent testimony that words struggle to match. Light and shadow carve out…

Pressed up against a welded wire gate, refugees search for any sign that the French Embassy in Phnom Penh might open to them in 1975. Faces appear and vanish behind the grid as bodies cluster in a tight corridor of uncertainty, the barrier turning every glance into a plea. A woman in the foreground looks…

At Tuol Sleng, the camera lingers on a single body, reduced to evidence. A man lies on a hard surface with his shirt torn open, the fabric bunched and broken across his chest, while his face—eyes closed, mouth slightly parted—sits between sleep and the final stillness. The tight framing refuses distance, drawing attention to bruised…

Grief collapses into the foreground as a woman kneels beside her husband’s body, one hand reaching toward him while the other covers her face. The ground is rough and littered with small debris, and the stillness of his form contrasts sharply with her trembling posture. Even without dialogue, the photograph communicates the raw immediacy of…

Rubble spills across the cobbles of Place Vendôme, turning one of Paris’s most polished squares into a raw landscape of broken stone and shattered ornament. In the foreground lies a toppled section of the famous column, its dark, scaly bronze surface now sideways in the dirt, while the remaining base stands blunt and stripped of…

A boy stands near the top of Leeson Street in west Belfast, caught between childhood and chaos, palms spread in a half-shrug while a stone rests in one hand. Behind him, a barricade burns hard enough to throw up thick, rolling smoke, and the street’s familiar terraces and shopfronts recede into a haze. The expression…

Pressed together in a tight embrace, two elderly Muslim women sit in the crowded refuge of a temporary shelter, their headscarves and lined faces drawing the eye to a grief that words cannot easily carry. One woman’s hand cups the other’s head as if to steady her, while tears and tension pull at their expressions.…

A lone woman leans into her stride, gripping shopping bags as she rushes down a bare sidewalk where everyday errands have become a dash for survival. The street around her is stripped of normal life—no crowds, no open storefronts—only the uneasy quiet that follows sustained violence. Her posture and pace tell the story as plainly…

Against the blank concrete of a Sarajevo apartment block, a man leans out of a shattered window with a small container in hand, trying to douse flames roaring from a neighboring flat. The firelight turns the interior a fierce red, while smoke stains the façade above the frames. Torn curtains and broken glass speak of…

Near the edge of a line of makeshift tents, an injured woman lies on a low stretcher set directly on the grass, her face turned toward the camera with a stare that feels both exhausted and unblinking. Around her, the camp’s routines continue: women in long dresses and headscarves stand, crouch, and tend to the…