
Ground Zero: Syria
Aleppo, once Syria's largest city, comes apart on camera as photojournalist Robert King spends 2012 and 2013 documenting the civil war for VICE. King works largely alone with a handheld camera, moving through neighborhoods reduced to rubble, past bodies left in the street, and alongside Free Syrian Army fighters holding positions block by block. The footage is raw and largely unedited, closer to a field diary than a produced news package: gunfire close enough to flinch at, families sorting through wreckage, children in the middle of an active front line. This compilation stitches together all six parts of the original series into one continuous account, tracking a conflict that by this point is already spilling into Turkey and Lebanon and destabilizing the wider region. There is no narrator smoothing the chaos into a clean storyline and no resolution offered, because the war King is filming has none. What the camera catches instead is proximity: a city's daily collapse, witnessed at street level as it happens.