She’s southern Iraq’s celebrity photographer, a former political prisoner who has spent more than 60 years behind the lens documenting people and places and defying convention.
Samira Mazaal is 77 and still going strong more than half a century after turning to photography to feed her family — because she had no choice.
“Peasants, intellectuals, I’ve photographed them all,” says the mother of two, her black hijab framing a face lined by life.
“I have photographed Amarah in all its beauty — I went deep into the marshes,” to the south of the city in the floodplain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Everyone in the area turns to Studio Samira, be it for a passport photograph or to have a couple’s portrait taken ahead of their wedding.
She tells how she became the first female photographer in Maysan province aged just 16, despite familial conventions that ruled in the Iraq of the 1960s, and also how political activism led to imprisonment and torture.
“My family has never known any other business — we’re all photographers,” Samira says.
Framed photographs lining the walls bear witness to her trade, in both black and white or in colours faded by time.
She has albums of images showing Iraq as it used to be: black-clad women carrying huge bales balanced on their heads; a smiling peasant woman in a flowery dress, her hair braided, standing near a cow; a mother and child filling a pot with water from the river.
