Iraq Photo Archive

Overview

The Iraq Photo Archive (IPA) is an online, crowd-sourced collection of vernacular photographs contributed by Iraqi diaspora living in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Europe. The archive was created in 2019 by Irish-Iraqi visual artist Basil Al-Rawi as the first phase of his practice-based PhD research at the School of Simulation and Visualisation at the Glasgow School of Art. Its core purpose is to collect, preserve, and activate personal photographs from Iraqi families — particularly those documenting everyday life in Iraq from the 1950s onward — and to create a counterpoint to dominant media representations of Iraq as a site of conflict.

History and Founding

The project emerged from Al-Rawi's personal experience growing up in Ireland with an Iraqi father, and his recognition that images of Iraq in Western media were largely defined by war and occupation. His father's personal photo albums — documenting Iraqi university life and daily society in the 1960s — inspired Al-Rawi to create a platform through which the diaspora could contribute and narrate their own visual histories. The archive was launched in 2019 and actively collected submissions through 2021. A related Instagram account was activated in February 2020 to support outreach.

Collections and Approach

The archive holds a growing collection of vernacular photographs submitted by Iraqi diaspora participants, covering everyday life, family occasions, and social scenes from across Iraq's modern history. Contributors are invited not only to submit photographs but also to record oral histories describing the context, emotions, and sensory memories associated with each image. The archive is described as a participatory counter-archive that foregrounds intimate and overlooked experiences rather than institutionalized narratives.

Relationship to the Broader Research Project

The IPA is the first of three phases in Al-Rawi's doctoral research, titled Recomposing the Archive: Remediating Memories of Iraqi Diaspora with Archive Photography, Oral History, and Virtual Reality. The third phase reimagines these photographs and memories within an immersive Virtual Reality environment called House of Memory, which has been exhibited internationally.