Across the country, unofficial groups of citizen-photographers have been risking their lives in order to document their country’s destruction and post their findings on Facebook. Collectively, they join under the banner of Lens Young, followed by the name of their city, the people living there or some other moniker. Lens Young Homsi, Lens Young Dimashqi [Damascus] and Lens Young Idlib, among many others, are made up of young men and women, some of whom are teenagers. They use whatever photographic equipment is at their disposal, from mobile phones to DSLR cameras, to cover the war.

Cemetery, Abed Elmoemen Kbrite, Lens Young Sam

While some of the images have documentary value, their photographs also capture the artistic side of the conflict in grainy black and white. A parallel movement has also emerged under the wider Lens Young umbrella, of people with an interest in photography who don’t take themselves too seriously but still focus on capturing the moment. A young man working under the moniker Silly Lens Young shot Box of Tobacco, a photo depicting a ‘Two Apples’-flavoured narghileh tobacco packet amid a neat line of waiting shells. The non-professional photographers in Lens Young are less interested in the aesthetics of photographic framing and composition than in capturing the moment. Their pictures also reveal the anger and frustration of ordinary people against the state, as well as revealing an emerging grassroots civil society where flyers warn people to avoid areas of regime violence and shelling.

Documenting and photographing are activities not without an element of personal risk. Activist Ziad Homsi, who shoots for both Lens Young Sam and Lens Young Homsi, was arrested by ISIS, the al-Qaida group, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, outside al-Raqqa. Held incommunicado, he was suddenly released eighteen days later.

The Lens Young photographers also provide a much-needed public service. After families were forced to flee from the continuous shelling in Homs, Lens Young Homsi answered email requests asking it to record the level of destruction that had taken place in their neighbourhoods. As one Syrian woman, who posted a Lens Young image on her Facebook page, commented: ‘These are the remains of my house and my street.’ The photo showed the devastation of a neighbourhood following heavy bombing.

The images on pages 119, 124 (top), 128 and 129 (bottom) are details from an installation of Lens Young photographs by Inzajeano Latif and Bibiana Macedo for the exhibition #without words: Emerging Syrian Artists, P21 Gallery and Mosaic Initiative for Syria, London, 2013.