© Tamara Abdul Hadi
Tamara Abdul Hadi visited the marshes of southern Iraq to reimagine a European photo book about the region made years prior
In 1977 travel writer Gavin Young and photographer Nik Wheeler embarked on an epic journey through Mesopotamia (or Iraq), chronicling the southern wetlands – an ecologically and culturally significant area which over the decades has become a hotbed for drought, political conflict and internal displacement. Young and Wheeler went on to publish a photobook, Return to the Marshes: Life with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq, which helped compel Tamara Abdul Hadi to be a photographer. In 2020 she returned to it, to critically re-engage with both its images and the ways in which colonial imaginations inflect photography.
During her career, the Iraqi photographer has worked with Reuters, The New York Times, and various other newspapers and magazines, but also long made personal projects. She has lived across the Arab region and had visited Iraq numerous times before 2003; after the US invasion she first went back in 2011, then again in 2018, when she travelled to the marshes for the first time to make images. “I shot on medium format film so I didn’t see them till coming back and developing them,” Abdul Hadi recalls. “I then looked at [Young and Wheeler’s] book and realised how many similarities there were between some of my photographs and some photographs in the book.”
“I would like to reimagine Young and Wheeler’s book, not because I’m angry about it, but because I would like to have a conversation around photographic representation”
This insight shifted Abdul Hadi’s earlier perception of the book from “reactionary anger” towards “an appreciation of the idea we actually had similar experiences”. Realising her positionality as a member of the diaspora, she recognised she also came to the region from outside. “That’s when I started thinking how interesting it would be to see if any Iraqis had archives from the time that Young and Wheeler were there,” she says. Reaching out on Instagram, she soon started to receive images from that era. “Then my project took another turn,” she reflects. “I wanted to have a conversation. I would like to reimagine [Young and Wheeler’s] book, not because I’m angry about it, but because I would like to have a conversation around photographic representation.”
Abdul Hadi’s main line of questioning was, ‘Can histories be colonised even in imagination?’, because she realised that her own conception of the Ahwar and the Ahwaris [marsh Arabs] had been coloured by Young and Wheeler’s work. Using her own photographs alongside archival images from Iraqis taken between 1976 and 1978, she is creating a book with the working title Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes, designed by her partner Roï Saade. In a region dominated by images of men, this series features many women and children. “Women in the marshes are very strong, they do the work,” Abdul Hadi explains. “They’re not just homemakers. They take care of the kids and cook the food, but they also work on the land with the buffalo and sell reeds. Women in the marshes are actually very present.”
In one scene a woman balances a washed blanket on her head; Abdul Hadi says she was very open to being photographed. Elsewhere another young girl, Nihaya, sits on a buffalo. Abdul Hadi recollects taking this photograph at around six in the morning; Nihaya had just finished milking the herd with her brothers before sitting for the portrait. In another image two men in blue hold hands in a tender moment of Iraqi male affection; Abdul Hadi approached the best friends hanging out after school, near the city of Chabayish. And in another soft scene, a buffalo sits under a blanket, separate from his companions. His owner told Abdul Hadi the animal was feeling unwell so was swaddled. The photographer was happy to find him feeling better the following day.
