Research

 Iraq Photo Archive أرشف صور العراق

The Iraq Photo Archive was created during the first phase of practice-based PhD research at the School of Simulation and Visualisation at the Glasgow School of Art. It is an online platform to facilitate the collection of vernacular photographs from Iraqi diaspora across the world. The collection is crowd-sourced, with images contributed directly through a submission form on the website. This form captures some basic descriptive information surrounding the image, such as location and approximate year, and also allows users to describe the image as they see fit.

The submission form invites contributors to express interest in taking part in an oral history interview about the image(s) they submitted. This process provided an opportunity for participants to take part in a filmed conversation describing their memory of a photographic moment, giving voice to the intangible and visually unrepresented elements, such as recollections of sounds and feelings.

The recorded conversations, together with the original photograph, were remediated into a digitally constructed environment, where viewers can enter an expanded interactive photographic moment in Virtual Reality. This virtual memoryscape is called House of Memory / بيت الذاكرة

The ongoing project is concerned with building collective community histories and counter narratives, forming wider understanding of Iraqi stories beyond one-dimensional media representations, and preserving intangible cultural heritage.