The opinions expressed in this essay are the author’s own.
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About the PhotographerTamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer whose work is concerned with the historic and contemporary representation of her own culture, in its diversity. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The National, Huck Magazine, VICE, Slate, and more. Abdul Hadi was a founding member of Rawiya Collective, a photography co-operative of female photographers in the Middle East. |
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How might colonized histories be re-framed and how can we imagine new ways of examining those histories through photography?
As a child growing up in the Iraqi diaspora, my visual imagination of Iraq was influenced by books in our family’s home library. One of these books was Return to the Marshes by Young and Wheeler, a documentation of the Southern Iraqi Marshes (Al Ahwar, a wetland area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in what was once the center of ancient Mesopotamia) by a British writer and photographer duo, published in 1977. This book was influential to me as a photographer as much as it was for me as a young Iraqi. Though having spent many months in Iraq during my lifetime, I did not get the chance to visit the marshes and its people until 2018. My imagination of this land and its native inhabitants until then had been shaped by images from this book and, as I placed my own images alongside the books’ I began my critical re-engagement with the collection and an exploration into the ways colonial imaginations inflect photographic engagement.
As a child growing up in the Iraqi diaspora, my visual imagination of Iraq was influenced by books in our family’s home library. One of these books was Return to the Marshes by Young and Wheeler, a documentation of the Southern Iraqi Marshes (Al Ahwar, a wetland area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in what was once the center of ancient Mesopotamia) by a British writer and photographer duo, published in 1977. This book was influential to me as a photographer as much as it was for me as a young Iraqi. Though having spent many months in Iraq during my lifetime, I did not get the chance to visit the marshes and its people until 2018. My imagination of this land and its native inhabitants until then had been shaped by images from this book and, as I placed my own images alongside the books’ I began my critical re-engagement with the collection and an exploration into the ways colonial imaginations inflect photographic engagement.
To decolonize photographic histories is to rethink the fundamental aspects of visual documentation, from approach to intention, and the power dynamics therein. Photography and photojournalism in particular have long been held as purveyors of truth, and magazines such as National Geographic have provided people around the world with singular visions of places, cultures, and people. There is not one ‘truth’ as it stands, and it has become imperative to critically engage with historical photographic representations. This way, we come closer to understanding how these representations lay over and affect both global politics and real people’s lives today.
In this work - Re-imagining Return to the Marshes - I explore how histories can be colonized, even in imagination. I re-imagine a book once foundational to me by considering questions of agency and representation, self and collective, in an attempt to advance decolonial visuality. I intervene, intrude, and interrupt their pages with my own photographic documentation of the Iraqi marshes and with archival images sourced from Iraqis in Iraq and the diaspora. My choice to interact with the book in such ways creates physical acts of decolonizing the photographic history of the marshes. Re-imagining colonial narratives and gazes involves centering those displaced and disempowered from their own histories and stories. |
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