Selling flowers on the streets of Aleppo

"A woman peddles bouquets of flowers outside the ruins of the passport office in Aleppo. "

Photographs from Syria, January 2025, by Victor J. Blue.

I found this image, from a Harper's photoessay about Syria, strongly evocative.  Photos of children selling flowers seem to have become increasingly prevalent, I think because the activity sanitizes and makes ethically acceptable the age-old necessity of begging (it takes no stretch of the imagination to compare this image with Hans Christian Andersen's nineteenth-century story The Little Match Girl.)  And some of these children are trafficked or forced into this activity.

If nothing else, the apposition of her image against the structural devastation of Aleppo serves as a reminder of the unutterable horror some people nowadays face as they are forced to live in an ongoing dystopic present, none of which is their fault.