Muheisen wanted to document the items Syrians had taken from home, but few people had many tangible possessions left. “Almost everyone I met had a photograph with them,” he says. Before he asked to see them, he drank tea and heard his subjects’ stories. The photographs had near-holy status, and viewing them prompted laughter and tears from a past life. “Photographs are the only physical moment from the past that we carry in the present.”