Open Shutters Iraq

Discusses the photobook and project conceived by Eugenie Dolberg and managed by Irada Al Jabbouri. The project began began life in 2006-7. Women from five cities in Iraq came together to plan a series of photo-stories about their lives, resulting in nine photographic essays. Often classified (dismissed) as ‘non-professional’, or as ‘participatory action research’ projects run by anthropologists and ethnographers, the images produced by such projects are routinely described as ‘intimate’ or ‘touching’. The essay argues that relegating these images to the merely ‘domestic’; or consigning them to the ranks of the ‘amateur’ is to fail to observe their considerable political significance.