Thana Faroq, I was younger yesterday
© Thana Faroq
Photography traditionally captures a moment: a still life, a tableau of collected pieces that represents a specific place, moment, person. It is a medium meant to freeze time—immutable, and limited by its lack of motion.
But what if it were used to capture the impermanent?
Experimenting with the physicality of images, Yemeni photographer Thana Faroq does just that. Having emigrated to the Netherlands in the midst of the Yemeni Civil War, she focuses on exploration, and the changes that “have been shaping and defining her life and sense of belonging both in Yemen and The Netherlands.” Her latest project, I was younger yesterday, examines the lives of six asylum seekers stuck between borders — with The Netherlands rejecting their plea for asylum, they have nowhere to go, trapped between worlds and unable to build a new home.
© Thana Faroq
Supported by the Prince Claus Fund, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and the Magnum Foundation, I was younger yesterday is a study in waiting: waiting for tomorrow, waiting for the next try, waiting for something to happen. Accompanied by hand drawn notes and doodles, the images track the feelings of non-existence lived by refugees.They ask the question of what it means to exist without something to belong to—how can you cling to your identity if you have no home? No place to ground yourself? How must humans adapt to survive a crisis like that?
© Thana Faroq
Everything in Faroq’s work is dark—bleak. After all, what joy can one find in a never-ending limbo? Why work in color when everything becomes a formless blob, melting together until nothing is distinguishable in the darkness and angst?
“As you wait your mind does not stop thinking,” Faroq writes. “[Y]ou are angry and bitter, lonely and abandoned. You wake up in the morning and put a smile on your face the same way you put on your socks before you head out.” If such behavior is perfunctory, why try to disguise it with bright colors and a cheery mask?
© Thana Faroq
Viewing the photos feels like floating in a shapeless murk, a sensory deprivation tank that deprives you of all meaningful sensation. Faroq’s audience floats, like her subjects, between borders, finding touchstones in people, in moments—lovers embracing on a couch or a woman basking in the fading afternoon sunlight. We are driven through the collection not by the photos’ looks, but by the feelings they evoke, of fear and anxiety and love that manages to persist despite everything. Dominated by shadow, this world of Faroq’s is bound in grey mist—a purgatory no one ever asked for.
Faroq’s subjects are consistent—she does not simply capture a moment in time and move on, caring only about the emotion she can evoke in a single photograph. Many of the faces in her work are familiar friends, those she has followed for over a year to document their struggles. Many more accompanied her on her own quest for asylum, as she departed Yemen for the Netherlands and left her own family behind. These are sympathetic faces, with as much history and meaning behind them as Faroq’s own.
© Thana Faroq
Trauma is valuable to Faroq. Not as a tool to manipulate, but a lens through which to view the world. “Photography is a beautiful distraction,” she writes, “and it has a quality in organizing the chaos. It makes cruelty look alright and that is what I love about it.” She makes grace out of tragedy, opening our eyes to lives to a world that lives just beneath the serenity of our “lucky borders.” We see her subjects not as fodder for news articles, or infantilized victims to be pitied. With Faroq’s personal experience comes a talent, an artist’s touch fueled by the desire to understand statelessness and the lives of those escaping conflict. We are forced to live in purgatory with her, to consider the lives of the refugees she follows, and to know their names.
More of Faroq’s work is available on her website and Instagram. Her book, I don’t recognize me in the shadows, is available from Lecturis Publishing.
