When Omar Imam works in refugee camps, he takes a decidedly different approach than photojournalists covering an international humanitarian crisis. That’s because Mr. Imam is a refugee himself: He fled Damascus, Syria, in 2012 after being kidnapped and tortured. He still doesn’t know who his captors were, but he is reminded of the ordeal whenever he smiles, revealing a row of perfect teeth that replaced the ones his kidnappers knocked out.
Soon after fleeing Syria, he volunteered at a refugee camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. But it bothered him that the stories reported from the camps were pretty much the same — “a copy of a copy of a copy,” he said — and never matched his own experiences there. The refugees were “overphotographed, but underseen,” he said.
“The people I met are in the worst possible conditions,” he said, “But they have the desire to continue being human.”
Mr. Imam set out to tell the story of his fellow refugees without resorting to stereotypes, spending weeks listening to their stories in a Lebanese camp a few miles from the Syrian border. Working collaboratively, he staged and photographed scenes from “their memories, fears, dreams and hallucinations,” he said. The refugees approved the ideas before they played out the scenes that would be photographed.
The result, “Live, Love, Refugee,” is a set of complex, surrealistic images that reveal the emotional and psychological lives of these victims of the Syrian civil war. They are absurdist political images that disrupt the audience’s expectations of “typical” refugee photographs.
“Omar is basically a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Dali,” said Tanya Habjouqa, who has photographed extensively in Lebanon’s Syrian refugee camps. “He has Dali’s twistedness and Chaplin’s humane humor.”
Mr. Imam, 37, made the photos under the guidance of Ms. Habjouqa and Eric Gottesman during an Arab Fund for Arts and Culture workshop last year that was sponsored by the Magnum Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund. Ms. Habjouqa, who marveled at his poetic images, said that while other photographers had been inside these camps, none had made such “intimate work that captures their real dreams and their real fears.”
Before the Syrian conflict, Mr. Imam, who has an accounting degree, helped run his family’s curtain manufacturing business. He discovered conceptual photography in 2003 and is now a professional filmmaker and photographer in Beirut. He will soon move to Amsterdam to work on a project about Syrian refugees in Europe.
For “Live, Love, Refugee,” Mr. Imam went to a camp that was about six miles from Syria. Most of the families he worked with had lost at least one family member before arriving in Lebanon. Participating in the project, Mr. Imam said, was meaningful for them.
“They enjoyed staging and dramatizing their own life,” he said. “My absurdity in the midst of the humdrum camp life was a bonus for them — especially the kids, who gathered to see me installing the set.”
It was also cathartic for Mr. Imam, who continues to stay in close touch with the families.
“I learned that even in wartime I can create my own space just with a concept and a camera,” he said, “despite all the money and weapons that control Syria.”
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