My grandmother in Damascus, Zahra Akbik, was a coffee cup reader. Her skill was to gaze into the bottom of a coffee cup and divine meaning from the shapes and patterns left by the coffee grounds. Her clientele (mostly made up of my mother’s friends) would trip over themselves in their enthusiasm to get a reading but would often leave the house either reeling from my grandmother’s blunt honesty (“your husband is cheating on you”) or ecstatic by the possibility of a windfall (“you will soon receive a lot of money.”)

As a child I would watch, fascinated, the faces of these women as they reacted to the news. Afterwards, I would look at the coffee cups myself to see what I could divine, before my grandmother would scoop the cups up and wash away the evidence. My abiding memory is that the coffee grounds looked like tiny pieces of art – temporary yet meaningful.

My latest photography project was inspired by this memory. I’ve created a set of simple and honest black and white portraits of people that I feel an inexplicable connection to. I then arrange for my subjects to have a coffee cup reading with a fortune teller in Turkey. With this technique, we can get a glimpse into each subject’s soul through the photograph, and a hint at their future. Each subject was photographed in front of a vintage pull up background, to help evoke the bygone era of my Damascene memories.

I looked into the faces, and futures, of a member of a Namibian San tribe, a young Palestinian girl, a prisoner, a skater, a farmer... people from varied backgrounds and different continents with whom I have a connection that could be partly based on energy,partly based on my childhood nostalgia. The results are a rare combination of art, photography and spirituality which strike a deeply personal tone.