Finding Light in the Darkness: Ayman al-Amiri explores his war-torn home

Words by Lorraine Mallinder & Images by Ayman al-Amiri

International multimedia journalist Lorraine Mallinder’s boots-on-ground journalism covers everything from political uprisings to social justice campaigns in some of the world’s most hostile environments, to give a voice to people who need it most. Lorraine’s guest feature in ‘the Photographer’ tackles the harrowing tale of a young photographer’s efforts to make sense of his obliterated homeland of Iraq and reinvigorate his national identity through his camera.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, the US invaded Iraq in what is now viewed as one of the biggest foreign policy blunders of modern times. Hundreds of thousands died as a result of the invasion, the ensuing sectarian civil war, the emergence of Islamic State and the general collapse of infrastructure in the country.

For Ayman al-Amiri, 27, the invasion would forever change the way he saw the world around him. He recalls Saddam Hussein burning crude oil around Baghdad to obscure bombing targets. The skies, the streets, the buildings, people’s faces were black with the smoke. Mourners would wear black for 40 days after their loved ones died. And all around him, the mood was black.

“There was no colour at all. Everything was black, black, black,” he says.

The son of a photographer, Amiri helped his father to document everyday life after the invasion – “in all sorts of situations, with water shortages, power cuts, a lack of food, the people crazy and scared.”

By the time he was 20, he’d saved up enough money from freelance jobs to buy his first camera, a Leica M3 with a 50mm lens from the 50s. A luxury item in Iraq, it had been found in the house of a wealthy businessman who had worked in the oil industry. It had cost him six months’ salary, but it was worth every cent.

Light and comfortable, it’s a fantastic camera to work with, he says. “In Iraq, you have to move fast because you don’t know what will happen with security and attacks.” A few years back, he lost a borrowed Minolta XD11 in the Battle of Mosul, following the Iraqi army as they routed out Islamic State, which was attacking them with rocketpropelled grenades. “There were so many attacks,” he says. “I was running very fast, and I lost it forever.”

Light In Darkness

AYMAN AL-AMIRI

Working with his Leica, he began to experiment with expired film that he’d found in an old camera shop in Baghdad’s Bab al-Sharqi neighbourhood. He wanted to get away from the “clean, soft, beautiful, perfect” results that were becoming so ubiquitous in digital photography. Working with expired film, the results damaged and grainy, he felt able to express some of his everyday reality. “Because my life is like this. Baghdad itself is an expired city,” he says.

His photos recently featured in The Baghdad Gazette, an exhibition in downtown Baghdad. It consists of a series of fictional front-page splashes on the most pressing issues facing a country that has been in crisis mode for the past two decades – though the stories aren’t your usual newspaper fare. One feature on the current suicide epidemic sees Amiri go underground – literally – to interview a 21-year-old who has just killed herself.

Nisan drank a bottle of poison after her father tried to marry her off to his friend, 30 years her senior. Devastated at the prospect of abandoning her studies to marry a man she did not love, she decided to end it all.

“Don’t you miss life?” asks the reporter.

“Can you miss something you never had?” she replies.

Iraq’s reported suicide rate is on the rise, owing to problems like crime, poverty and abuse. But, in this conservative society, it’s a taboo subject, so the root causes go unaddressed. “They kill the dead twice,” says Nisan, who now lies abandoned in her grave, her soul screaming for eternity. Though the failed wedding singer in the grave next to her provides a touch of gallows humour.

Another piece, written by collaborator Furat al-Jamil, features an interview with a water buffalo named “Taj” in the marshes of Iraq. Taj has survived the Iran-Iraq war and the US invasion, but is now witnessing the drying of the mighty Tigris, as a result of drought and dams built upstream in Turkey. “This river is 7000 years old, but there is no water,” says Amiri. “The buffalo was reared since Sumerian times. It is very famous in the marshes, a protector of the water.”

His photo of a lone buffalo among the reeds has a dark poignancy, offering a glimpse of a world that may soon cease to exist. As it turns out, Taj is a spirit buffalo, who spreads his large wings, casting a foreboding shadow over the wetlands, before taking flight.

Now working as a photographer for Agence France Presse in Baghdad, Amiri wanted to break out of the 24/7 media cycle to tell Iraq’s story in a quieter, more emotionally engaging way. By blending fact and fiction through stories and photography, he and Jamil wanted to get people thinking about issues like health, poverty and climate change, he says. “People are thinking outside the classical style. They see that the pictures go with the ideas, creating the same feeling.”

The events of the past two decades have left Iraqis in a state of collective burnout, says Amiri. “People in Iraq stopped using their imagination, they stopped dreaming. They don’t have time to process,” he says. “With the Baghdad Gazette, we wanted to tell people: let’s think again, dream again, have hope again.”