Alumnus Captures Conflict to Tell Stories
The photos Cengiz Yar takes are hard to look at and even harder to look away from.
Amid dusty earth tones — the rubble of fallen desert cities, crisscrossed with dark wire; camouflaged fatigues; fragments of bone out of context — he captures swaths of verdant countryside and snaps of deep red — carnations atop a casket, a kaffiyeh scarf, a smear of blood. Whether devastating or beautiful or both, the shots invite the viewer to take a closer look: This is the face of suffering. This is humanity.
A documentary photographer and freelance photojournalist, Yar (Cook ’09) has focused recently on two main subjects: the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the proliferation of gun violence in the United States.
His work takes him from Kurdistan to Ferguson and back, to places probably unfamiliar to most of his fellow Saint Louis University alumni.
But his background, at least the SLU portion of it, is certainly familiar. Like so many students, Yar came to Saint Louis University from his hometown of Milwaukee because of a scholarship (in his case, the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship) and because he’s a legacy (his aunt and uncle, Marge and Pete Donegan, graduated in the mid-1970s). Add in a series of good grants, and SLU was his best option, although maybe not the most obvious path to what he planned to do with his life.
Yar fell in love with photography in high school and knew it was the career for him. But Saint Louis University offered only a few photography courses.
“It didn’t make sense to me to go to school for photography,” Yar said. “I went to SLU knowing I’d want to run my own business someday, and that I’d be able to get a good business education there.”
He studied in the Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business while gravitating toward extracurriculars with a visual bent, including video production for SLU TV and a summer internship at a small media company in St. Louis.
Then he decided to study abroad.
“I wanted to be as far away from my comfort zone as possible,” Yar said. So he chose the program farthest away, ending up at Beijing University of International Business and Economics through an exchange program sponsored by Loyola University Chicago. As soon as he got to China, his perception shifted.
“Beijing was a complete shock,” he said. “I was immediately overwhelmed by how many other people there are in the world.”
The frame around him was expanding, quickly. He returned to America and to SLU with a global perspective, and decided to concentrate on international business.
After graduating, Yar spent a year and a half teaching English and developing his photography skills in Thailand, and then moved to Chicago, which he still considers his home base. Since 2012, he has traveled in and out of the United States, mostly to the Middle East. At the end of October 2015, he relocated to northern Iraq.
I wanted to be as far away from my comfort zone as possible.
Cengiz Yar
Not affiliated with a specific news or photo agency, Yar is entirely freelance, which essentially means he’s putting that business education to good use. He does all of his own pitching, marketing, fundraising and accounting. And then there’s the work of photography, of course.
“Less than 5 percent of my work is actually taking photos,” he estimated.
He splits his work between creating stories for nongovernmental organizations and producing material for news organizations and magazines. His work has been published and mentioned by some notable news sources, as well: BBC World News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Maclean’s Magazine and Mashable among others. In 2015, he was awarded the Online News Association’s inaugural James W. Foley award for conflict freelancers.
Accepting the award, Yar said, “For a freelance journalist, specifically one that has covered the war in Syria, I can’t think of a higher honor than this. I’m incredibly grateful."
However, the award also flashed a warning: Foley was an American freelance journalist who was abducted in Syria and beheaded by ISIS in 2014. His death reminds journalists everywhere of the potential danger of their profession.
Yar definitely has been in his share of intense, life-threatening situations. He’s been in combat, in ruined cities strewn with hidden explosives, at the site of massacres.
“I don’t think of myself as brave,” he said. “In combat situations, I’m very much afraid.”
He works through those moments, though, to focus on the important job of witnessing and storytelling.
“I’m incredibly privileged and blessed to see all of this and meet all these people,” he said. “I want to tell their stories because they deserve a voice in the international news cycle.”
So Yar goes to the ruins of Sinjar, Iraq, to Aleppo, Syria, to even Baltimore and Chicago, looking for stories that might not get told otherwise.
He is most proud of “Syria’s Children,” an ongoing project that documents the lives of often overlooked victims of the Syrian war: child refugees living in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. With the consent of a parent or guardian, Yar interviews each child and takes his or her portrait. He uses Polaroid film, with all of its imperfections and nuances, and then scans the photo and gives one back to the child.
“I wanted to put a face to the crisis in Syria,” he said. “Everyone is special and deserves respect. Many of these children don’t have anything, and for me, their portrait is a simple thing to give back to them.”
Except for a donation of film, the project has been funded entirely by Yar. The project was nominated for the 2014 UNICEF Photo of the Year. Since 2014, he’s photographed more than 200 children.
That’s just a small fraction of the stories to tell, the pictures to take. Don’t look away.
— Amy Garland
This story originally ran in the fall 2016 issue of Universitas.