Open Shutters Iraq – Personal Statement

I was never very good at working within the system. Most of my memories from childhood live in naughty wonderland with my grandmother. My father is a Russian dissident whose passion was to get censored Russian literature published in the west and the house was always full of exiled intellectuals and artists. Looking back, it is no wonder I ended up where I have.
I left school early and started working as a photographer. I was very lucky to have a wonderful photographer from St Petersburg take me under his wing in New York and teach me to find the magic in the subtlety of fine photography. Full of ambition, I travelled the world photographing.
As the years past I became more and more frustrated with the mechanisms of the media, working inside it I felt I was getting dragged into a kind of sickness that had nothing to do with the beliefs that motivate me, or even the type of photography that moves me.
I am not a character to become disillusioned quickly, and besides was having a wonderful life, privileged with all the inspirational people I would meet while I was shooting my stories. The more time I spent out of the west, where the hub of ideas that shape worldviews and perspectives are created, the angrier I became. It made no sense to me, why should a foreigner fly into a region, tell the stories of the people to a western audience only to shape foreign and development policy towards that country. Surely, the people themselves had more understanding and right to tell their own stories not only to the outside world but also to their own region, to shape their own futures and record their own histories.
I contacted friends of mine who founded PhotoVoice, a young organization breaking ground in participatory photography, and worked with them in Cambodia, a country very dear to my heart.
It was a wonderful experience but I found that too often the medium of photography was leading the final story rather than the photographs reflecting the real beliefs and passions of the participants. I wanted to teach photography not only as a medium of documentation but as a way to really share their ideas and emotional experiences. While working with Jane Martin, a theater and development specialist, I realized that before starting to make stories the participants needed to have the space, trust and creative techniques to reflect on their lives.
I met a group of young journalists in Syria and asked them what they felt would be an important and rewarding project to do with them. They said they needed skills and a platform for their ideas but that the really unexposed stories belonged to women normally outside the public forum. We designed a program where the journalists would bring women from their communities to support for the duration of the workshop, gaining the skills and equipment they needed and developing their human interest reporting while focusing on their partner’s stories. That is how I came to the methodology we are constantly developing with Open Shutters.
The journalists were all from different religious communities and choose to theme the project around the subject of religious diversity. The dialogue was fascinating and inspired incredible photographs. I finally felt like I was getting closer to a genre of work I could really believe in.
While I was in Syria, Iraq was become increasingly unlivable and dangerous under the occupation. Many Iraqis were being forced to leave and come to Syria. I heard more and more stories of the courage and enterprise of Iraqi women and began to wonder if it could be possible to make a project in Iraq. One late autumn night, Nawara Mahfoud, a former participant, dear friend and brilliant Syrian Project Manager in Open Shutters Iraq, sat in my small room in the old city of Damascus with a group of Iraqi musicians and poets. One lady had just come from Baghdad and told us of the enduring bravery of Iraqi women. That night our dream was born to give the Iraqi women their own voice to speak to the world about the reality of war behind the collective headlines that were slowly dehumanizing their country.
Back in London, a Syrian friend introduced me to Maysoon Pachachi to see if she might be interested to make a film about the project. From that first meeting in the NFT bar, she has given, both the project and me, her unwavering and generous support. I went to see Rohan and Hugo at Index on Censorship to ask if they could help find a publisher for the Syrian book. I told them about the Iraqi project and we began the long process to find a funder willing to carry out such an unconventional project in the intensifying Iraqi crisis. Months later, I was back on a plane to Syria.
Open Shutters Iraq has been the most rewarding experience of my life. It seemed like a mad idea to most. I mean who would seriously think it worthy or possible to train a group of women in photography during this horrific time. Surely, as one journalist said to me, they have more pressing problems they should solve before learning a luxury skill. I cannot speak for the people of Iraq’s priorities but I think the determination and dedication with which the Iraqi women have approached this project speaks louder than words. I remember the first phone call I had with Irada Zaydan, the Iraqi Project Manager, who quit her job as a professor at the University of Baghdad to work on this project and risked her life on several occasions, “This is not a project, this is a dream. A dream I want to live for my daughter. So she can grow up and understand what is truly happening now.”
I can’t say it was an easy dream, it was completely consuming for everybody involved. I have lived in the region for some time, I came from a background of political oppression and my work has exposed me to some pretty extreme situations. Everything I thought about Iraq was shattered. I had no idea of the severity of the Iraqi experience in the last few decades. No one had escaped unspeakable loss and trauma. No one has had a moment off to recover.
The women came from all over Iraq and very different backgrounds. I was nervous, and wondered if the dialogues might instead become raging arguments. Although there were moments of tension, everybody tried to respect each other’s experience and ideas. I would watch their faces full of compassion, as they would listen to each other sharing intimate details of their suffering. It was an honour to live with such an extraordinary group of women. Women hold power and strength in a very different way to men and this was the first time I had really seen it, I think it is often shadowed in the predominantly male systems. The support they gave each other and emotional connection was breathtaking, as they would unload years of repressed emotions.
I will never forget the morning when I asked the women to make blind lifelines. We put on some gentle oud music and, pens in hand, they closed their eyes. The room was charged with emotion as they tried to recall every moment of their lives and consider how they had been affected. I walked around their tables watching their faces and bodies change with the line they were drawing, their hands stiffen and tense as the line went down – a particularly traumatic memory – and their shoulders and forehead relax with recollections of happy times. Each of them was somehow isolated in their darkness with only the sound of marker pens scratching across paper to remind them of the presence of others. Without words I saw them travel through wars, sanctions, broken marriages, grief, love, happiness, times of resistance, achievements, and small triumphs…
Their choice of stories was bold and well executed. I am very proud of the work they produced and at the same time feel the weight of the responsibility I carry with it. I have to find a way for it to reach people.
It is not that stories of kidnapping, soldiers occupying your house, brothers and fathers disappearing in prisons and narrow escapes from death are all that unfamiliar, but so often we miss the point when we understand the world only through the reporting of events. The actual lived experience is full of often-unexpected consequences. I feel that the truth of events lies inside the people who live them, but, sadly, this truth is so often silenced.

Tehran, July 2007