Not so long ago, I inherited a small box of photographs, albums, travel books and maps from my father; things, as he aged, he no longer wanted to be responsible for. Since I am a photographer, he said I was the best person to care for them and find them useful. The diaries and written material went into the hands of my sister who is a writer.
I knew the contents of the box well, as many an afternoon was spent looking through them on my infrequent visits home. As I sifted through the now vastly reduced collection, it struck me that even as I was making new images that promise to last forever, this material from years ago was losing identity, gathering dust, mold and slowly being erased. Some negatives were wrinkled and some had no image left to tell their story. Many others didn’t survive the abuse of climate and carelessness (a few boxes sat in the balcony of my parents’ home for years, open to sun and rain).
One collection in particular brought back a flood of memories; an album from my childhood, along with an envelope of negatives and a government tourism book of slides. This was from our time growing up in Iraq, now a beleaguered land but at that time, a vibrant nation holding its own in that geography. I was just 6 years old at the time. My sister, older to me, has stronger memories than I do; mine were partly shaped by the photographs that my father used to make all the time. We both carry a great longing for our life there, and during our long phone conversations we often speak of the people we met, the friends we played with, the smells, textures and sounds. Through the almost four long years we lived in the dusty towns of Iraq, my father and sometimes my mother too, made images often, on an Agfa point and shoot film camera with a bright orange shutter button.
Albums slowly filled up with photographs, not of the grander things in life but of small everyday events; of tea being brewed on the red stove top, friends visiting in the evenings, the street we lived on, of my mother combing her long hair or teaching me to write, my sister and I playing make believe games or even simple family time at home. Some of the photographs were not even technically ‘good’, often hurriedly composed, blurred and out of focus. But in the blurred images, I recognise a commitment to document our everyday life. Much like the process of developing a photograph from a negative, my memories of that time and place remain latent and just out of reach till this archive of photographs brought them into focus.
All of this material lived in boxes for over three decades but I didn’t yet decipher what it meant to me. But after all these years when I opened the tourist booklet of slides showcasing images of the country, to me it immediately read like propaganda material. The timing of the publication in the late 70’s, the elevated, self congratulatory language and the accompanying imagery felt like the government was pitching for allies in the Western world in the early days of the Iran-Iraq war. Knowing what I know now of the aftermath of many wars that Iraq had seen since, I saw only the hidden meaning, and not the tourism book.
I started bringing together family photographs, slides from the book and negatives. I scanned the images and layered them, with the idea of offering an alternate reading of the found photographs through personal memories. My sister and I spoke for days, gathering words and memories that bubbled up which slowly got layered on the images. All of this work came together in the initial shape of my small photobook titled 24 Slides. For years the material waited patiently to be revived and remembered and I felt an urgency to share them with the world. But the book is only one part of what I want to create, a work that is still taking shape, and hopefully will organically grow into a larger narrative. The more time I spend with it, the more perspectives I see emerging.
Here I am reminded of photographer and writer Stanley Wanambwa’s observation in The PhotoBook Review journal “…the resurgence of archival projects in the photo book suggests an eagerness on the part of many artists to explore the intersections, or indeed presences of the past in the present tense.” Where the younger me took the material at face valueearlier saw this material for what it was, today my way of seeing the world has changed. To me the presence of the war is evident in the images I picked; my mother covering up shelled walls with a pretty bedsheet for the family portraits, the joy of sharing tea with friends contrasting with the memory of someone lost, my mother homeschooling me because the schools in town were bombed etc. We live in a time of political turmoil, endless wars, mistrust, and fear, and through this book I chose to underline our inability to learn from our past.
These found photographs, family albums, letters and diaries now exist not just as an evidence of a specific place and time, but as small place holders for events that shaped the land, as my memory of the people who lived there or made it their home briefly, and how my perspective has changed over time. The last two years especially have taught me the need to discover, understand new ways of seeing and narrating stories through my arts practice. Working with photography archives has deepened my relationship with the medium, the concerns going beyond just making images in the present, but also to look back and see how my experiences have influenced my thinking and help me find my place within the world.
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