Caravanserai, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2012, takes its title from the roadside inns that once sustained movement across the Silk Road. Built along routes linking China, India, and Europe, these places offered shelter to traders, pilgrims, and other travelers, functioning as practical nodes in an early transcontinental system of exchange. Their surviving remains—ruined, restored, or absorbed into new uses—give the book a precise historical subject without reducing it to archaeology alone.
Belgian photographer Tom Schutyser approaches the caravanserai through the Levant, traveling through Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan after years of photographing related sites, first in northeastern Iran. His subject is not limited to architecture. The photographs attend equally to surrounding landscapes and to the material traces of continued occupation, allowing the buildings to register as changing environments rather than isolated monuments. Ruins, functioning structures, and their settings form a sequence in which history is encountered through space, erosion, adaptation, and absence.
The project’s larger significance lies in the tension between an inherited network of exchange and the troubled relations between Western and Muslim worlds in the present. Caravanserais appear here as evidence of long-standing multicultural contact, while also prompting questions about what forms of dialogue might be built now. Contributions from writers, thinkers, and journalists concerned with the Middle East and international relations extend the photographs into a broader conversation without displacing their documentary force.
With 90 colour and black-and-white illustrations, the 180-page hardcover is issued in English and French and measures 30 × 21 cm. For a serious collector, the book deserves attention as a sustained photographic study in which architecture carries social and political memory. Schutyser’s combination of historical research, regional travel, and close observation gives the volume a distinctive balance: neither a conventional architectural survey nor a purely atmospheric record, but a carefully framed account of places where movement, commerce, and cultural encounter have left visible form.
