Tsawwar… Tamara Abdul Hadi

"In this image, my cousin Sulafa stands on the balcony of her home in Baghdad, Iraq. It’s May 2023, and I’m visiting her and her family with my mother and sister. We had just finished lunch, and I asked Sulafa if I could make a portrait of her. For me, her image brings back visuals of old photographs of my mother and her sisters, posing on the balconies and gardens of their homes in Baghdad. I want to see more of these kinds of photographs associated with Iraq. I came of age in the 1990’s consuming violent imagery of my homeland and seeing its people dehumanized on mainstream media. Sulafa came of age amidst it all, moving through life as Iraq was bombed and pillaged through wars and aggressions rooted in fear, greed, and hunger for power. As I spend more and more time in Iraq, I wonder at its beauty and am consciously aware of the pain inflicted upon it. Iraq is beautiful." 

Tamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer, anthophile, and educator investigating the links between photography and representations of culture. She engages photography and printed matter to tell stories about land, labor, and human connection, particularly of the Middle East and its diasporic communities globally. Check out her work a here @tamarabdul

Tsawwar is an ongoing visual series in Daftar which explores the stories behind a photograph, taken in the region or by an Arab photographer, written in their own words.