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Baghdad Photographs by Amr Nabil |
[Catalog essay for thr Sony Gallery Show "Baghdad,
Before the Bombs Begin to Fall" March 12 - May 8,
2003]
Moments
Before The Bombs Begin To Fall
When Amr Nabil returned to Baghdad in September 2002s, he was already on edge, expecting war at any moment. "For me" he writes, "it was a matter of going on 24-hour alert. I used to even sleep next to my camera, ready for any contingency. But after a few days I discovered that while I was wracked by tension, life all around me went on - people chatting in the coffee shops, Iraqis laughing, praying, and going about their daily business. It looked like the Iraqis had been waiting for decades for this or that attack."
Most of these pictures represent that sense of private life imposing itself upon ideological construction: scenes from coffee shops, markets, the Tigris River; scenes from hospitals, cock-fight parlors, and schools. Saddam Hussein is also there, as a brooding presence in posters and statues, like Big Brother in 1984. But this is not an exhibit of official Iraq: no mass rallies, neither pomp nor circumstance, nor detention centers, nor torture chambers, nor firing squads. Instead, just that extraordinary blend of people who make up Iraq - Sunnis and Shia, Arab and Kurd, Muslim, Christian and Sabean - a people, Amr Nabil says, who are convinced war is coming and who until that moment are determined to live their lives as best they can.
S. Abdallah Schleifer