“The Syrian photographer Serbest Salih had just finished university, in 2014, when the Islamic State laid siege to his home town of Kobani. He fled to the Turkish province of Mardin, just over the border, where tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have settled during the past decade’s civil war. A multiethnic conflict zone at the edge of Mesopotamia, Mardin is home to a community center called the Sirkhane Social Circus School. Under the tutelage of volunteer instructors there, children affected by war learn to juggle, spin plates, and walk on stilts.

In 2017, Salih started a photography workshop at Sirkhane, teaching students to shoot and print their own analog photographs. A few years later, he began leading the workshop from a mobile darkroom in a secondhand caravan, packing up his materials every month to drive to a different village and a new group of kids. “When I show the children how to develop their photos, I am always awe-struck by their reactions,” he writes, in “I Saw the Air Fly,” a new collection of the children’s photography, from Mack Books. “Many of them really believe at first that it’s a type of magic.”

Salih’s students include local Turks and Kurds as well as displaced natives of Syria and Iraq. One aim of the workshop is to improve neighborhood relations, uniting children from communities that might otherwise remain isolated owing to linguistic and cultural barriers. “I Saw the Air Fly,” which gathers more than a hundred black-and-white images, features grand landscapes of Mardin’s hilltop district, intimate depictions of domestic life, and whimsical scenes of acrobatics—a boy hula-hooping in a dimly lit kitchen, a pair of children practicing their bridge poses, bellies thrust to the sky.

The directors of the Sirkhane circus school admit, in their mission statement, that Mardin is “a region where it is not easy to be a child.” But the pictures in Salih’s series continually disrupt expectations of young refugees as benighted figures or objects of pity. The book takes its title from a poem by the Syrian modernist Adonis, and its dominant mood is not gritty realism but a dreamy playfulness. In one group portrait, overexposure nearly erases a jump rope held by two friends at opposite ends of the frame. The young girl between them seems suspended in flight, her limbs blurred and her ponytail still rising in the moments before she must return to the ground.”