Golden Hour in the White City
Photographer Anita Bursheh finds beauty in the light and animated skies of Amman’s Jabal Al Ashrafieh.
By Catherine Mazy
On a breezy summer day, around 6pm, as the sun sinks before Jabal Al Ashrafieh in Amman, birds swirl and kites swoop across the orange skies. The sand-coloured buildings, perched in rows on the steep hillside, glow like gold. It’s a place and time photographer and Amman native Anita Bursheh never tires of capturing with her camera.
Like Istanbul, Athens and Rome, Amman is built on seven hills, or jibal. Jordan’s location at the crossroads of ancient civilisations has made it a melting pot of cultures for millennia. This rich history is etched into the landscape, such as a spectacular Roman theatre, Umayyad ruins and archaeological finds of the Bronze Age Ammonites, who gave Amman its name.
A connection to this history runs in Bursheh’s veins. As a Jordanian of Palestinian and Syriac/Assyrian heritage, she embodies the vibrant tapestry of cultures that define her beloved Levant. In the 1940s, her mother’s family settled in Al Ashrafieh, making it a bridge to her roots. It is one of Amman’s older neighbourhoods, where communities of different faiths and backgrounds have coexisted for decades, she notes.
“Everyone was friends with their neighbours, knew who they were,” she says. “The sense of community was really nice. Not to be afraid of what’s unfamiliar. I love that in Amman, because of the diverse society each area has different foods, traditions, even accents and how people look. What I experienced as a kid was that people came from different places.”
Bursheh recalls the vibrant dynamism of the neighbourhood: the stunning sunsets viewed from rooftops, the sight of the entire city spread out below, and the patchwork of lit windows, each telling a story. She remembers laundry swaying on balconies, tools scattered in corners, and the hum of daily life—evidence of a community that thrived together.
“I don’t live there, and I don’t know if living there is still the same as I remember it,” she says. “I don’t want to romanticise untruthfulness in my mind, but that is what I felt when I was a child, visiting the family house.”
Other parts of Amman have more beautiful old houses than the crowded, sometimes harsh conditions of Al Ashrafieh, which “doesn’t have architectural charm,” she says. “I love it for the views and the diversity.”
Amman is blanketed in a yellowish haze in the summer, but in winter it “has the most beautiful skies,” Bursheh says. “It’s always cloudy but not gloomy. We always have rays of sun. The refraction of light through the drizzle makes gorgeous shades of pink.”
The city’s “beautiful chaos” isn’t as overwhelming as that of, say, Cairo, she says. Instead it’s “random, very organic.” Graffiti is not only tolerated but some building owners commission artists to enliven their façades with murals, featuring local and regional cultural figures, old Arab singers, or “random things, like funky pop culture.”
Travel made Bursheh appreciate Amman more. She lived in Germany for a year and a half, then Riyadh. “It opened my eyes,” she says. “It wasn’t a worn-out place I got tired of seeing.” Photography not only helped her to better discover the country, but it also opened doors to talking to people.
In her photos of the neighbourhood, she likes to include people, stray cats, food markets, donkeys and horses. “It’s a lot of everything in one shot,” she says. “It’s kind of chaotic, but beautiful. It has a charm I haven’t seen anywhere else,” she says. She imagines the backstories of the dignified old men with their keffiyehs and shemaghs that they wear with suits.
And she scans the sky for birds, mostly pigeons raised by Al Ashrafieh residents on their rooftops. “Everywhere you look, you see birds,” she says. “It represents a big part of my childhood. Whenever I see birds and pigeons, it makes me feel safe.”
Photograph by Anita Bursheh
