Bergger official

SHORTLIST 🏆 Bergger Analog Photo Prize

Édouard Elias

Syrie année 0

The Syrian civil war has turned the country into a landscape of absences. Since 2011, entire cities have been reduced to ruins, and tens of thousands of people have vanished into the regime’s prisons. Incarceration—in Damascus as in Tadmor—was not the exception but the rule, a machinery of power that swallowed bodies and erased names.

Arthur Koestler, in Darkness at Noon, described the forced repetition of confession that breaks the individual until he denies his own existence. Stefan Zweig, in The Royal Game, imagined instead a prisoner who survives by voluntarily replaying mental chess matches to stave off madness. These visions converge in the Syrian experience, where repetition becomes both an instrument of domination and the last resort for staying upright.

Inside the prisons, memory itself was systematically attacked: disappearances, mass graves, and the erasure of archives all aimed to dissolve even the possibility of remembrance. Yet traces remain—scratched walls, trembling inscriptions, fragments of graffiti. These involuntary marks become archives in spite of themselves. Hannah Arendt reminded us that without memory, no permanence is possible: these material scars matter precisely because they endure, even when everything conspires to erase them.

Thucydides, in recounting the Peloponnesian War, claimed to write not to please the moment but to create “a possession for all time,” emphasizing the repetition of the same mechanisms of fear and domination through the centuries. Syria reenacts this pattern: besieged cities, civilians held hostage, prisons used as instruments of control. Today’s ruins and cells join a long continuum of experiences marked by enforced forgetting and defiant remembrance.

SHORTLIST 🏆 Bergger Analog Photo Prize

Thibault Lefebure

Temporary Land

This photographic work bears witness to a form of exile that intertwines the ancestral myth of pastoralism with the harsh realities of contemporary political struggle.

In Lebanon, one-third of Syrian refugees are reportedly unemployed in a labor market with virtually no regulation. Often low-skilled, those who manage to find work endure difficult conditions for very low wages. In rural areas, refugees sometimes appear more accepted by Lebanese society. Yet, it is primarily the men’s presence that is desired—as cross-border laborers. The long-term settlement of their families is perceived as a burden on an already strained socio-economic system.

In the mountains, however, non-industrial agriculture survives thanks to this cheap labor force, which has preserved ancestral values and knowledge: pastoralism. Herders and shepherds work together to feed the flock and, through careful management of grazing lands, sustain resources for years to come.

Today, conflicts, displacement, and political divisions have fractured these ancient ties. Agriculture—once a unifying force—can no longer bridge divided communities, and this fragmentation contributes to the degradation of Mediterranean ecosystems.

Through their movements across the mountains emerges a complex relationship with a land that is both a refuge from the violence of war and a source of discrimination. As Syrians, they belong geographically and culturally to the Mediterranean basin, yet their status as refugees distances them from a land that still feels like home.