Hasan Belal first picked up a camera as a teenager, when family gatherings in his hometown of Tartus somehow turned him into the person responsible for documenting everyone. Photography stayed with him: first as a hobby, then alongside his humanitarian work, and eventually as photojournalism — a profession he pursued in Syria even when simply taking pictures could come with serious risks.

Years later, sitting on the floor with his parents and sister, going through old albums, Hasan found himself fascinated by the people looking back at him: his mother in dresses on the streets of Tartus, his parents kissing in public, friends hugging, people dancing, going to the sea — and, above all, looking remarkably relaxed and happy. They showed him a version of Syrian life that felt both familiar and strangely distant.

We spoke to Hasan about how photography became his way of understanding Syria, what it meant to work secretly as a photojournalist, why he chose to stay, and what those old family photographs can tell us about everything that changed in between.

— Hassan, how did photography first come into your life?

— It actually started with my family. Every weekend, whenever we went somewhere together, my uncle would bring his camera. It was a proper, professional-looking camera, and somehow everyone decided that I would be the one documenting our trips. There was no particular reason for it — it just became my role.

Then, around 2012, a year after the war started, a lot of people were displaced from other Syrian cities to Tartus, my hometown, because it was relatively safe at the time. International organisations and different initiatives started working there, and I became a volunteer with one of them. That was when I began photographing more seriously.

After two or three years, that work ended, and I had to move around to continue working. I worked with different organisations, including UNICEF, and over roughly seven years I lived and worked across four or five Syrian cities.

I never studied photography. I studied economics. So for a long time, I took photos and did what was essentially photojournalism without realising there was a name for it.

Eventually, in 2017, like many people who want more professional opportunities in Syria, I moved to Damascus. I thought I was coming for work, and then I basically got stuck here. Damascus became home, and photography gradually became my profession.

— And was there any moment when you realised you wanted to become a photojournalist?

— Yes. In 2017, someone called me in Damascus and said, “Hassan, I know you’re interested in war photography. We have access to Eastern Ghouta.” At that time, Eastern Ghouta was an extremely dangerous place. But I immediately said yes.

What interested me was not only the destruction. Eastern Ghouta had been under siege for years, and I became curious about how people were actually living there — particularly how they moved from one area to another. People had built these handmade means of transportation because normal infrastructure simply wasn’t available. I made a short story about it called The Scooter of Douma.

After a month, the assignment ended. I remember thinking: What am I supposed to do now?

So I collected everything I had photographed in Eastern Ghouta, edited it into a story and submitted it to a grant programme connected to the Thomson Foundation and Dar al-Musawir in Beirut. That became my first more formal encounter with photography education and photojournalism.

It sounds funny now, but that was when I realised: Ah, what I have been doing actually has a name. I’m not simply taking photographs. I’m doing photojournalism.

I came back to Syria with a very different idea of what I wanted to do.

— And how difficult was it to actually work as a photojournalist in Syria at the time?

— In 2017, I had the opportunity to travel to Eastern Ghouta with one of the organisations working there. At the time, the area had been under siege for nearly four years. While I was there, I kept returning to a simple question: How did people move from one area to another in a place where war had imposed a siege, and the regime prevented most essential goods from entering?

Transportation was no longer available as it would be in ordinary life. Cars were scarce, public transportation was largely absent, and even everyday movement between different areas had become part of the reality created by the siege. This question led me to look more closely at the small details of everyday life in Douma, particularly the ways people found to move around and continue their daily lives despite these conditions. This is where the idea for Scooter of Douma came from.

Scooter of Douma is a simple story about the means of transportation that people used and adapted during the years of war and siege, and about the ways they tried to maintain their ability to move and carry on with their daily lives. Through this simple means of transportation, I want to approach the experience of the siege from a different perspective—not only as a military or political event, but as a reality that reached into the smallest details of everyday life, even something as ordinary as the question: How do you get from one place to another?

— I also know that you were arrested… Why?

— In January 2024, following an airstrike in Damascus, I went to photograph a funeral procession the next day. At the time, journalists were generally expected to obtain permission to cover events like this, but I didn’t have access to the relevant authorities, so I went on my own and discreetly took photos on my phone.

I was detained and later transferred to a Syrian military intelligence branch, where I spent 12 days. I was questioned about why I had been photographing the funeral and was accused of spying for Israel.

It was a frightening experience. My eyes were covered when I was brought in, and one of the first things I heard was someone referring to me as a spy. At the time, they did not know that I was working with Anadolu Agency.

— You had an opportunity to leave Syria. Why did you keep coming back?

— In 2022, I had an artist residency in Switzerland for three months. While I was there, I made a project called I Feel Longing, looking at immigrants and refugees.

At the end of the residency, everyone was telling me not to go back. My family in Syria said, “Man, stay in Switzerland. You don't have to come back.” People in Europe also thought I was crazy. They would ask, “You are really going back to Syria?” And I said yes.

I didn’t want to apply for asylum at that point. After all those years, I didn't want to leave Syria because I was forced to leave.

I wanted to travel as any other person in the world travels. I wanted to go somewhere and then be able to come home.

By 2022 or 2023, I had built a life in Syria that mattered enormously to me. I was doing the work I had dreamed of doing. I had a very strong community around me. I had my friends.

And through photography — both documentary photography and journalism — I had also discovered my own country in a completely different way.

I was also fortunate not to have had to serve in the military. Despite the many difficulties I experienced in Syria, as many Syrians did, I am grateful that I stayed. My decision to remain was connected to my life, work, relationships, and sense of belonging here. After the fall of the regime, this feeling became even stronger. I felt that I wanted to remain in Syria and continue documenting and understanding the changes taking place around me, rather than leaving the country behind.

— Your family archive project, Open the Drawer, feels very different from your photojournalism. How did that begin?

— There was a period when, especially among young people in Syria, it felt like we had lost everything. There was this feeling: This is our life now. Nothing is going to change. We can't do anything. Everyone around you was exhausted or depressed.

Because of my work, I had a degree of financial stability, so perhaps I had enough distance to begin looking at things differently. I started thinking about very simple activities and about my own family.

I remembered weekends in Tartus when I was younger. A lot of people would get together, drink, make tabbouleh, take photographs, spend time with each other. And I started asking: Why can't we still do this? These are such simple things. They are affordable. Why did we stop?

I was also tired of fear. When you work on documentary projects with people in Syria, it can take an enormous amount of time to build trust, because people have learned to be afraid. I have lost a lot of people because of the situation here, so that atmosphere of fear affects me very deeply.

I wanted to do something simpler and more intimate. For years after I left Tartus, whenever I came home every two or three months, I would sit on the floor with my father, my mother and my sister. We would open drawers filled with old family photographs and start talking about them.

Initially it was almost a joke. We would make comments about how someone looked or what somebody was wearing.

But then I started really looking at the images. And I thought: These are actually very good photos.

— What did you start noticing in those old photos?

— First of all, I was fascinated by my parents. I would look at photos of them kissing in public and ask them, “Was this completely normal then?”

I am also very interested in clothing. I would see my mother walking through the streets in certain dresses and wonder how she felt, how people around her responded, why there seemed to be this ease in the way people interacted with each other and with the camera.

The visual anthropology workshops I had taken came back to me. We had discussed analysing families through old photos, so I started applying some of those methods almost instinctively.

I began asking my family questions, doing small pieces of research based on our conversations and looking for patterns across the archive.

Eventually I realised that the project wasn't really about whether I had taken the photographs myself. I hadn't. It was about preserving something.

I wanted people in my community — and especially a younger generation — to look at these photos and see: Look at how these people interacted. Look at what ordinary life looked like. Look at the intimacy between them. They were doing incredibly simple things, but there was joy there.

So I began scanning the pictures, collecting them, sequencing them and editing them into a story.

I didn't expect the project to receive the response it did. It travelled much further than I imagined, through publications, books and exhibitions.

That made me want to continue it rather than leave it as one finished series.

— Since this project is about your family, tell me more about your mom and dad please!

— We are basically a middle-class family from Tartus. We were always very connected, and that closeness is something I feel we have lost to some extent after years of war and everything that followed.

There is actually a joke connected to one photo from the project. There was an exhibition in Beirut where a photo of my mother and father kissing was displayed very prominently. I called my mother on video, and she was very happy about it.

— What are your parents like?

— My mother, Hiyam, is a primary-school teacher. She's an incredibly active person.

She has this mentality that children should work during the summer and earn some money rather than just sit around.

My father is quieter. He worked as a government employee, and at one point he also had a small leather and shoes shop. And that shop was actually connected to how my parents met.

My mother's family lived by the sea, close to the corniche, and my parents would meet there secretly. My mother's cousin owned a film camera and was apparently very talented. He documented a lot of those meetings.

— Is there any photo that is really important to you?

— My mother used to teach on Arwad, the island just off Tartus. One of the things I find fascinating about those photographs is that Arwad is traditionally a more conservative community. Many families there made their living from the sea.

At one point, one of the families had a large boat, and there was a school trip where my mother's class went out to sea.

In the photos, you see people dancing together — boys and girls, teachers, children — completely relaxed.

When I look at those pictures from the 1990s, I find them fascinating because they complicate a lot of assumptions about what Syrian society looked like.

The same thing happens when I look at photos of my father with his male friends. There is such physical closeness between them!

In those photos, the relationships feel very natural. People seem much less self-conscious about expressing affection.

For me, that's a very important part of the archive: the freedom to express your feelings without immediately thinking about how somebody will judge you.

— Are you continuing the family archive project now?

— Yes. I was invited to take part in an annual artist-book event in Cairo, where they asked me to present the project in book form. So I'm currently working on it.

And I want to continue collecting material from my family. I don't want it to be only a sequence of photos anymore. I'm thinking about including other layers — messages from my father, my mother, perhaps their memories in their own words.

I also want to understand more about the person behind many of the photos, my mother's cousin, and find a way to bring his role into the story.

For a long time, I talked about doing more with the project without actually doing it. Now I want to really complete that next stage.