Former political prisoner and famous photographer in the traditionalist south of Iraq, 77-year-old Samira Mazaal continues to defy the codes and parade the inhabitants of Amarah in front of the lens of her studio.
“From peasants to intellectuals, I photographed them all. I photographed Amarah in all her beauty, I went to the heart of the nearby marshes,” sums up Samira.
For a passport photo or to immortalize a couple of bride and groom before the wedding, everyone rushes to “Studio Samira”. In Amarah, a small town on the banks of the Tigris, near the border with Iran, the septuagenarian is a celebrity.
With simplicity, she tells how, from the age of 16, she became the first female photographer in her province, despite family reluctance in Iraq in the 1960s. Then her political commitment, almost in spite of herself, which earned her imprisonment and torture.
“My family didn’t know any other profession, we are all photographers,” says Samira, her black hijab framing her wrinkled face.
Lining the walls, old framed photos, in black and white or faded colors: we see her at different ages, most often with a camera.
In albums, she keeps her ethnographic pictures which narrate an Iraq of another time.
Women all dressed in black carry huge bales balanced on their heads.
A smiling peasant woman, flowery dress and braided hair, stands near a cow. A mother and her child fill a pot with water from the river.
– “Society is cruel” –
A precursor, his father was one of the first to introduce photography to the province.
“I asked my father to initiate me. He said to me: + no you are still young, you cannot, society is cruel +”, recalls the septuagenarian, mother of two children.
He will soon be forced to change his mind. Blinded after a failed operation, he can no longer provide for his family. His daughter takes over. She first uses the daguerreotype, then her father sells land to buy her a more modern device.
“My studio has had an unnatural success,” she laughs. “Because I was a young woman, I could take pictures of the families.”
Paradoxically, she took advantage of the conservative codes of society: the fathers of families preferred to know that a woman photographed daughters and wives, rather than a man.
“There is not a household in the whole province of Missane that does not know Samira, the photographer,” recognizes Bassem al-Zoubaidi, a client.
“My generation knew Samira because we came there to be photographed. The previous generation witnessed her political activism”, continues the forties.
In 1963, in an Iraq torn apart by revolutions and their share of bloody repressions, Samira, then a teenager, had no idea that a communist leaflet would lead her behind bars.
– “I was screaming so much” –
After a coup d’etat by the Ba’athists which brought General Abdel Salam Aref to power, she received a visit to her studio from three militants who asked her to reproduce a tract en masse denouncing the new regime.
She admits that she had not yet fully forged her own political conscience, but that she had acted “out of sympathy” for her brother’s ideas.
“In all of Amarah there was not a wall where the leaflet was not pasted,” she boasts. “It’s not a crime, but a source of pride.”
A photo, which she still keeps, made her famous. She’s in a hospital bed, after being tortured in a building in Amarah.
“I was screaming so much that I thought the whole town would come to save me,” she recalled.
Four years of abuse and illness follow in a prison in Baghdad. After an international solidarity campaign, she benefits from a pardon decreed in favor of several political prisoners.
Under former dictator Saddam Hussein, she was briefly imprisoned in 1981. And again in 1991 for a demonstration in Amarah denouncing the repercussions of the first Gulf War.
Like several other detainees, she was granted a pardon a few months later.
Today, Studio Samira still welcomes its customers. And despite the great age, the revolutionary flame still burns.
Ms Mazaal hails the October 2019 anti-power uprising, sparked by angry Iraqi youth: “The protesters should have turned their movement into a massive revolution to uproot corruption and the corrupt”.
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