When I was in my twenties I used to ride the metro there with a good friend who was French, and she always was annoyed (“Why do you care?”) with my habit of choosing which car of the train to board so I’d be lined up with where I was going. I still do it, and I’d say honestly that it’s probably a marker of a certain type of obsessive personality which I now understand and confess to.
Like my friend, Mexico too is the opposite of that personality. A few nights ago I rode the metro back to our rental and across from me was a family, three generations riding together. A couple with what looked like the woman’s mother, and her two children. Her husband held an oversized girl (probably about five) in his arms as she slept and the mother read her other younger daughter from a paperback book. I almost stayed on the train past Tacuba (where I needed to transfer) just because I was enjoying watching them. If I really knew how to live slow I probably would have stayed on the train.
A couple of days ago I received a screed from a good friend asking “Why should it be more difficult to turn on a TV today than it was 50 years ago?” I think that’s a good question. I’ve spent several days trying to craft a workaround so I can import captions into the picture galleries on this blog, almost a complete waste of time since I never got it working. I still position myself on trains, and am still hyper-aware of timings that most people hardly pay attention to.
Sometimes it’s good to be in a place that’s just the opposite of who you are. I’d like to think I share some characteristics with the people in Mexico City – and that’s true – but there’s certainly a lot of foreign territory.
Sadly, I’m not still friends with the woman from my twenties. Her email address hides behind multiple layers of verification codes, and I’ve never been willing to jump through the hoops. But I actually would like to compare notes and see where she ended up too.
I feel it’s my compassionate duty to beam back warmth and color to my northern friends enduring the gnarly part of winter. As we took off from the Montreal airport the landscape was a frozen monochrome white. Beautiful, in a graphic way, once you got off the ground but still hard ice.
A friend from home has been reminding me almost daily of the countdown to changing our clocks, a small encouragement and marking of spring’s impending arrival. I hope some of these photos will work to warm you. Some are from previous visits to Mexico City, but they are all taken at this time of year, when the city breaking out into spring.
The only surviving photograph of my grandfather, with my grandmother and mother as an infant (about 1917).
My mother experienced the Armenian genocide as a young child. It never really left her. She was born in 1915, the oldest of three children. To us, her children, she was not open about her early life as an Armenian growing up in the Anatolian highlands. Under sustained questioning she would say that she didn’t want to pass on ethnic hatred to her children, which we took as a reasonable rational for her silence. Nevertheless, after her death in 2002 we have pieced together some of her past. In spite of our efforts at historical reconstruction much has been lost through war and intentional erasure. Some windows into that past still remain, however, stored in archives, personal histories, and academic research. My mother’s history intersects some of those sources, but it’s hard to tell exactly how closely. The recollections she did share were those of a young child – loss, fear and perceived safety. She was not a factual witness. Nevertheless, the facts are available and some stories remain.
The entire seafront was in flames, with panicked crowds running along the quay, trapped between the inferno and the water.
Smyrna in flames
In September 1922 my mother would have been about six. Her father, a German-trained doctor, had already been killed in the genocide. Her mother and two brothers were marched under the protection of an American humanitarian organization to the seacoast. The area, indeed the whole highlands of Turkey, was in chaos. The Greek army, with strong encouragement from Britian, invaded the old Ottoman Empire in an attempt to carve out a “Greater Greece” that would incorporate historically Greek or Byzantine territories, including western Anatolia and Constantinople. The Greeks failed, and the war was ending in a Turkish victory. Nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal’s command were entering Smyrna (now Izmir), a cosmopolitan port where Greeks and Armenians formed a large majority. Within days, organized looting, rape, and massacres erupted targeting Greek and Armenian neighborhoods, culminating in a great fire on September 13 that destroyed much of the city and drove hundreds of thousands of people onto a narrow strip of quay between the flames and the sea. It’s not completely proven that my family was in the city but if not it was nearby. The six-year old remembered a piano with gold hidden inside dropping into the ocean, and crying, as people were rowed out to ships. Looking at >>newsreels<< from the time it’s easy to understand why a child would have erased the memories.
Refugees – Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and others – crowded the waterfront for miles, unable to move inland without risking murder or deportation, and unable to leave by sea without ships. Allied warships from Britain, France, Italy, and the United States lay at anchor in the harbor, close enough to hear screams and smell burning flesh, but initially under strict orders not to intervene beyond protecting their own nationals and property.
Asa Jennings and the improvised rescue
Into this paralysis stepped >>Asa Kent Jennings<<, a five‑foot‑two Methodist minister from – of all places – upstate New York, who had recently arrived in Smyrna as a YMCA worker. Jennings had no official rank, chronic health problems, and no authority beyond his wits and his willingness to take personal risks on behalf of strangers.
Asa Jennings didn’t really cut a heroic figure, but through his willpower he got the American and Greek governments, with the acquiescence of the Turkish authorities, to allow women and children to depart Smyrna.The small block on the left contains Jennings’ words communicating with the Greek government. The message was translated to Greek and then radio telegraphed to Athens through the American battleships.The long quay was filled with refugees hoping that the ships would rescue them.
As the city burned and refugees packed the quay, Jennings quietly began to organize an evacuation by sea, working around the hesitations, and even opposition, of the great powers. Drawing on contacts with the Greek government and merchant marine, and leaning heavily on the moral pressure created by western aid agencies and sympathetic U.S. naval officers, he helped assemble a flotilla of Greek vessels that could shuttle refugees to safety across the Aegean.
U.S. ships, Near East Relief, and the flotilla
Jennings’ efforts only mattered because some American military officers chose to bend their orders in humane directions. U.S. destroyer captains in the harbor had been instructed to remain neutral, but regardless (or perhaps in willful defiance of the orders) several ships moved closer to the quay, took on refugees in limited numbers, and used their presence – and their searchlights – to deter attacks in small sections of the waterfront.
Near East Relief, an American humanitarian organization created during the First World War, was already deeply involved in feeding and sheltering Armenian and Greek refugees across the region, and used its network to coordinate information, negotiate with Turkish authorities, and press Allied governments for evacuation. Once Jennings had secured permission and cooperation from the Turkish command and the British admiral in charge of the destroyers, the first Greek ships of his improvised flotilla entered Smyrna harbor on September 24 to begin mass embarkations.
Over the following weeks, this ad‑hoc system of Greek ships, U.S. and British naval cover, and American relief workers evacuated hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenians from Smyrna and nearby ports – estimates range from roughly a quarter‑million to more than 350,000 people who were saved. There were about 1.5 million people killed in the genocide, but the evacuation saved a significant number of souls.
The handwritten caption: “US Jackies rescuing Armenian woman in evening dress”.Refugees on US destroyers off Smyrna.
I often wonder what my mother would have thought about the present. One way to contrast the two times is to imagine two harbor scenes. In 1922, terrified Greeks and Armenians crowd the Smyrna quay while American destroyers sit offshore, their captains torn between orders and conscience, until a minor YMCA worker bullies and cajoles a flotilla into existence. In 2026, equally terrified families from Sudan, Syria, or Honduras crowd land borders and airports, falling into a system of bio-metric screening, quotas, and policy experiments where the decisive factor is not one person’s courage, but the political calculus of Washington.
Rose, my grandmother, had graduated from Anatolia College in north-central Anatolia, which was a four-year liberal arts college sponsored by the Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches. It accepted students from all the provinces of Turkey as well as from Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Russia and Crete. Importantly, its student body of 282 was half female. The photograph was taken in Alexandria, Egypt, where Rose settled the family in a large, mostly female community of Armenians.My mother married my father but never got over her puzzlement and frustration with the opposite sex. A large part of that had to do with her experience as a child, and subsequently being brought up in a mostly female community.
Both worlds show how nations are capable of generosity and of indifference, sometimes at the same moment. The Smyrna rescue happened because of individual Americans who took action, acting through ships, churches, and charities. Such actions can save vast numbers of lives even when official policy opposes them – while the present shows how law can be used either to scale up that spirit or to cage it behind ever‑lowering ceilings and ever‑narrowing doors.
The naval pictures were found by my brother, David, in the US Navy archive.
A Neopolitan pizza, just out of the oven, and ready to serve. What could be better? Normally it’s brought to the table unsliced, still inflated and soft from the intense heat.
One of the reasons, maybe even the main reason – I wanted to go to Naples, was to eat Neopolitan pizza on its home turf. I was surprised how my priority faded away as I jumped into this truly rich and alive city. I was also surprised at how, instead of me leading the pizza eating, it was Beth clamouring for more. Some days we’d eat pizza twice – considerably up from the tolerance level at home. Part of the difference, of course, has something to do with my pizza not being on the level of Napoli pizza. Napoli pizzas are so light as to be almost ethereal. It feels and tastes like a divine combination of melted hot mozzarella, tomato and warm soft dough dancing in a steam cloud. At home Beth will usually leave the edges of my pizzas on the plate. In Naples I had to protect my own slices from my ravenous partner.
Even with our enthusiastic approach we weren’t able to come close to covering the list of pizzerias I wanted to visit. But three places stood out. It’s almost not fair to highlight them because even the worst pizza we had in Naples still approached a work of art. That’s how good Naples pizza was, so it certainly didn’t disappoint either one of us. This essay is about Starita, one of those places.
Via Materdei near Starita Pizza
I did get the impression that pizza has become big business in Naples. A lot of people – tourists from all nations (including Italy) – come to Naples expecting to eat pizza and serving them in large numbers generates good cash. So many of the pizzerias have expanded their seating capacity, either by renovating their existing premises, buying adjacent properties and serving there too, or opening up other pizzerias at other locations under their name. Pizza in Naples isn’t expensive – it costs about half of what we pay in Montreal – but a successful pizzeria can be a lucrative enterprise.
Starita’s entranceKitchen staff at Starita giving me the one-over.
Starita is up a narrow stony lane in a working-class neighbourhood. The street it’s on – Via Materdei – climbs up out of Naples’ historic center. Starita began life in 1901 as a cantina, serving local wines. The original founder – Alfonso Starita – stuck to the simple formula serving wine to working-class residents of the neighborhood. It was one of his children who in 1933 expanded the operation, serving utilitarian Neapolitan dishes – bean soup, fried anchovies, fried baccalà, tripe, and fried pizzas. It wasn’t until 1948 that Starita became a pizzeria friggitoria – a fried food shop and pizzeria. A few years later its fame was sealed by a bodacious Sophia Loren, who in the 1954 film L’Oro di Napoli, played a sexy, beautiful and adulterous pizza seller. Starita was used in the film as a hole-in-the-wall shop selling fried street food. Instantly, the film put Starita on the map. The connection between Starita and Sophia Loren has become inseparable from the pizzeria’s identity. But the depiction in the film of pizza being the food of the poor, with pizza being sold on credit, was real and was drawn from the economic conditions of postwar Naples, experiences that the Starita family had lived through firsthand.
Starita in 1954 Vittorio De Sica’s film L’Oro di Napoli with Sophia Loren and Giacomo Furia using Starita as a location. This film instantly made the pizzeria a popular destination! Photo credit: Screengrab from YouTubeStarita today An original poster for the Sophia Loren film is on the back wall.
I wasn’t prepared for how friendly it would be to eat there. We probably didn’t appear to be anything more than English-speaking tourists, albeit both with a pizza-based enthusiasm (probably not rare either), but we were treated well. The experience is that your order is placed and a couple of minutes later the pizza is before you – it’s literally that fast. There’s an immediacy to eating that makes it quite satisfying! As well, none of the pizzerias in Naples are shy about having pictures taken – they invite it – and some even have carefully thought out angles they try and encourage you to show. Starita doesn’t go that far. It is a pizzeria confident of its position and concentrates on making great pizza, and providing an environment that makes eating those pizzas a memorable experience. For us they succeeded. Even though we were trying to eat in as many places as we could manage, we still came back a second time. From its modest days as a neighborhood cantina Starita has expanded. Well reviewed versions of the pizzeria have opened in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen (2012), Milan (2016), Turnin (2018) and Florence (2021). Despite the growth, the Materdei original remains the beating heart of the operation. The pizzas are what count, and they are what will draw me back there over and over.
Antonio Starita is the third-generation owner of Starita and a central figure in the institutional protection of Neapolitan pizza culture. In 2016, he became the founding president of the Unione Pizzerie Storiche Napoletane, which brings together ten of Naples’ oldest pizzerias (Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele, Pizzeria Lombardi, Starita, and others). He is currently transitioning the business to the fourth generation – his son and daughter.
For more: YouTube video of how they make their dough link (this will make you hungry!) YouTube video of the Sophia Loren scene from L’Oro di Napolilinklink2 (both worth watching!)
Evangelical Christian gathering in Central Park, 1967
From the time I started using a camera I’ve photographed people. Most of the time I’m completely open about what I’m doing, but I also like swinging the other direction and taking pictures where I’m more surreptitious and people are unaware of the camera. When miniature cameras came into play in the 1930s photographers quickly took advantage of their size to photograph unobtrusively in public spaces. I did too – some of my earliest photographs were street photographs. At the time I didn’t know anything about Walker Evans or Helen Levitt or really any of the history of the medium. To me it was exciting to take un-posed photographs. I liked the serendipity and the interplay with coincidence which lies at the heart of street photography. It shaped both how I shoot and my attraction to the medium’s mystique. Unlike most photographic genres, which often involve contemplation and thought, using my camera on the street unfolds the uncontrolled theatre of everyday life. I photograph in this environment not as a director, but as a responsive observer, being alert to the fleeting alignments that appear without warning and vanish in an instant. For me, serendipity is not just a pleasant surprise; it’s what gives the best photographs lasting meaning.
At first glance, it is tempting even for me to describe these moments as “luck.” A person steps into strong light with graffiti in the background that mirrors their fashion, couples march arm in arm lost in the urban landscape, a glance or gesture becomes an unexpected moment. I happen to be present, at precisely the right time. Yet if I stop at luck, I misunderstand my own role. Serendipity is less about random fortune and more about the meeting point between chance and my readiness.
Over time, I’ve cultivated a particular state of attention that invites serendipity. I’ve learned to recognize promising situations—strong light, layered reflections, expressive fast moving crowds, unusual streetscapes—and I linger without knowing exactly what I am waiting for. This patience is not passive; it is a quiet form of anticipation that assumes something might happen. When a convergence does occur, I have to react instinctively, framing and exposing in fractions of a second. Normally I use the traditional wide angle lens of street photography which is forgiving of fast action, but in these photos I chose to use the more difficult short telephoto to concentrate on figures, and to isolate them within the urban environment. The resulting photos may look like pure accident, but actually they rest on familiarity with my camera, a sense of composition, and countless hours spent wandering without any guaranteed payoff.
Serendipity also shapes the way street photographs are interpreted. Viewers often project narrative onto coincidental details: a shadow aligning with a face becomes a metaphor for inner turmoil, a repeated color across strangers suggests hidden connection, a sign’s content appears to comment on the person beneath it. These readings often exceed anything I consciously intended at the moment of exposure. My street photography, then, feels like a collaboration between the chaos of the world, my own alertness, and the imagination of the viewer. Serendipity is the thread running through all three, binding them together.
In a culture saturated with images that are posed, retouched, and optimized, serendipitous street photograph holds a special honesty for me. It acknowledges that the world is richer and stranger than my plans, and that meaning can emerge from chance encounters as powerfully as from deliberate design. When I practice street photography with openness to serendipity, I accept that I am not fully in control—and I discover, again and again, that this lack of control is precisely where some of my most resonant images often arise.
Return to Damascusis my new book of photographs, available for order, that preserves fleeting impressions and the spirit of a place through the lens. Accompanied by brief reflections and memories, the photographs offer a tribute to the place and its people, focusing on enduring character and the subtle interplay of light, architecture, and tradition. Return to Damascus is a quiet celebration of observation and memory, inviting viewers to participate.
How Many Roads? is a book of photographs by Jonathan Sa'adah, available for order, offering an unglossy but deeply human view of the period from 1968 to 1975 in richly detailed, observant images that have poignant resonance with the present. Ninety-one sepia photographs reproduced with an introduction by Teju Cole, essays by Beth Adams, Hoyt Alverson, and Steven Tozer, and a preface by the photographer.
If you'd like more information, please have a look at this page.
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