Finalist 2018: Christian Werner

In his “Road to Ruin” series, German photographer Christian Werner explores new ways of reporting on conflict situations. With quiet images that border on poetic, he speaks about the lives of the people in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria following the fall of East Aleppo.

War has been raging in Syria since 2011. The consequences of the conflict have now spread way beyond the country’s borders. Aid organisations speak of the greatest humanitarian crisis of the last decades, with hundreds of thousands of dead, and millions of refugees. Starting as a protest against the regime, events soon escalated into all out civil war, which, at least since the entry of Russia into the conflict, has evolved into a proxy war between regional and world powers. Christian Werner, however, does not set his focus on political and military events.

Accompanied by the German journalist Fritz Schapp, the photographer travelled throughout Syria four times over the past two years. They met with people in Homs, Aleppo, Latakia, Damascus and Raqqa, talking with them about their lives in a country dominated by war. Werner documented the atmosphere in what are now partly ghost towns, but where, despite everything, life still goes on. With their warm hues, the quiet images border on poetic. His compositions are made up of daily life scenarios and unsettling situations, drawing the viewer closer to gaining a sense for the incomprehensible horrors of war. It is a style of war reporting that does not provoke pity and indignation, but rather empathy and understanding for a people who have been branded by war.