The National

At first, and in a manner driven purely by aesthetics, Jaber Al Azmeh photographed tyre tracks in the sand during his travels in the Qatari desert.

A nature lover, he had been photographing the landscapes of Syria in an abstract manner, with a view to publishing them in a book.

That plan was put on hold four years ago at the outbreak of the civil war, when he and his family fled their native Damascus and moved to Doha. There, he set up a company for commercial photography, similar to the one he had managed back home.