Moises Saman is one of the most substantive and accomplished conflict photographers working today. A member of Magnum since 2014, he is best known for photographs he has been making for more than two decades working throughout the Middle East, during which time he covered the Iraq War and the Arab Spring. Many of the latter pictures were sequenced together in his first book Discordia (2016). Moises and I spoke about his second and most recent book, Glad Tidings of Benevolence (GOST, 2023).
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Zach Ritter (ASX): Before we discuss your new book, Glad Tidings of Benevolence, I was hoping we could spend a little bit of time discussing how you came to photography to begin with, and what, specifically, compelled you to start making the kind of work that you do. Not being a photographer myself, I am somewhat limited in my capacity to understand how one decides to pursue photojournalism, conflict photography, war photography, or whatever label we deem most appropriate for your work. And while your experience is hardly one to generalize from, still, I’m curious about how your life and your photography developed such that, for example, you were in Baghdad in 2003 when the very first bombing operation was being carried out by the United States and its allies. What brought you there, and what was the extent of your interest, and professional activity, in the Middle East up to that point?
Moises Saman: I stumbled into photography indirectly through my studies of Sociology in University, influenced by a professor that introduced me to photojournalism and documentary photography in his lectures. Photography gave me a tool and an excuse to begin to engage with the wider world around me, and this discovery awoke in me a curiosity that I had never felt before. This was in the mid-1990’s, and I started to pay attention to the news, in particular the war in the Balkans, and I became fascinated with the work of the photojournalists that were covering that conflict, whose photos I would see published in TIME, Newsweek, and The New York Times.
I switched majors from Sociology to Communications, with an emphasis in photojournalism, and began to take photography classes and to collaborate with the university newspaper. That led to some internships in small and mid-size regional publications in southern California. My big break came in the summer of 1998 when right after graduating from university I was offered a summer internship at Newsday in New York. Working as a photojournalist in New York was a great learning experience, I quickly learned my way around the city, and how to work fast to beat the competition. I was mostly working out of Newsday’s NYC bureau, Giuliani was mayor, and the NYPD was involved in several controversial shootings. Covering crime in the city meant always trying to stay a step ahead of the cops, preventing us from getting to the scene, sometimes forcefully.
Then in the autumn of 1999, with the money I had saved from my internship, I traveled to Kosovo, alone and without an assignment, the war in the Balkans was winding down and wanted to see the events for myself, what I had seen in photos back in the early sociology classes. I crossed a war-ravaged landscape, guided by a university student that I befriended along the way. Our first stop was his family’s village on the outskirts of Prizren, where we discovered the charred remains of his family home, now a pile of broken concrete. Outside Gjakova, we witnessed scenes of utter despair during the unearthing of a mass grave.
Kosovo was a turning point for me, and it is where I became a conflict photographer. I was transformed by the experience of seeing people’s lives stolen from them, their bodies treated as if they had no families, no histories, and a place in the world. As I stood there with my camera, I felt the importance of documentation, for the sake of accountability, to prevent that such loss could go unmarked, and then be disputed…buried–literally and symbolically. Upon my return to New York in early 2000, Newsday offered me a staff job in their New York City bureau where I covered local news and features. For the next year and half, I learned the meaning of deadlines, honed the art of the stake-out, and sharpened my elbows in one of the most competitive media markets in the world.
Later, while on my first foreign assignment for Newsday in the West Bank, 9/11 happened, shaping the careers of an entire generation of journalists, including my own. This was the biggest story of my generation, and Newsday gave me the platform to cover every bit of it, beginning with Afghanistan in 2001. Less than two years later, I was among the few western journalists to stay in Baghdad to cover the US invasion from inside Iraq.
2003, Baghdad. Oil fires set alight over the Tigris River on the even of the invasion to obscure the view of US warplanes flying over Baghdad © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos
2003, Baghdad. A man tries to tame an Arabian horse looted from one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces during the early days of the fall of Baghdad © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos
ASX: Can you talk about your experience in Kosovo and the catalyzing effect it had for you in deciding to become a conflict photographer? More specifically, because you went there on your own as opposed to on assignment, was there a difference in how you moved and worked in the field and amongst people? Had you already developed a way of seeing and making pictures that you felt confident with, or that felt mature to you? Or was this something you were still working through in Kosovo and beyond, even perhaps into the first days of the war in Iraq? I ask these questions because of the perspective I see in the work you present in both your books, one in which an atmosphere of feeling, and of psychology, is often as much the subject as a dramatic event or compelling actor, and so I wonder if these ways of seeing and types of sensitivity were learned by you or developed over time.
Saman: In Kosovo I was confronted for the first time with the stories of violence and loss that were common among the people that I met, but I also have to admit that going there was as much about myself as the stories that I was documenting, and this is a fact that I remain conflicted about. I went to Kosovo searching for my own path forward, full of enthusiasm and ready to test my senses and ability to navigate an environment that I had never experienced before. But the truth is that I was out of my depth, and from the moment that I landed in Albania I was mostly guided by the generosity and goodwill of the people that I came across. On the flight from Budapest to Tirana I met an Albanian Muslim cleric that invited me to stay with his family for a couple of days while we figured out how to get me accredited as a journalist by NATO, and then into a helicopter flight to the Kosovo border. On that helicopter ride I met a group of American doctors that gave me a ride into southern Kosovo and invited me to stay with them while I figured out my next steps. Soon after I arrived, I started to hang around one of the local hotels where journalists were staying, and there I met Brahim, a young Kosovar university student that was looking for work as a fixer. Brahim became a lifeline to the story, and my guide for the rest of my stay.
Since I was working without an assignment I had no real plan, other than eventually going to Mitrovica, a contested Serbian enclave in northern Kosovo that was the focal point of the violence at the time. My visual approach in those early days was very shallow, mostly focused on capturing peak action and drama without questioning the histories leading to that moment, nor what came after. I lacked the sensitivity to understand the gravity of some of the scenes and emotions that I was witnessing, and that was reflected in the superficiality of my pictures, which at best were mediocre repetitions of news photos that I had seen before. As a photographer, I was still years away from opting for the quieter and ambiguous moments that could capture a mood, the complexity and contradictions, or as you say the “psychology” of a scene, rather than conveying information on the frame. I had been trained as a traditional press photographer, focused on capturing single images that tell the story, being a fly on the wall, not really interacting with the situations and subjects that I was photographing, for the sake of a perceived sense of objectivity. To me, this detached approach led to pictures that were superficial and predictable, perpetuating a visual narrative that later I began to feel detached from. I was reducing the people I photographed to a type, rather than asking who are these women, who are these men? Do they have names? Hopes? Lives? Or are they just icons of a dark moment?
I think that it was in Iraq where I started to slowly pull back, and try a different way, instead of just focusing on the action, my eye would veer toward light and shadows, shapes, and to compositions that aimed to provide more context about the daily lives of people caught in the conflict. The approach was still quite classical, but the result was not your traditional press photograph. I really was not sure if my photography was answering any of those questions above, but the search kept me motivated and engaged.
2010, Samarrah, Salahaddin Province. New and old graves at a cemetery on the outskirts of Samarrah © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos
ASX: When the invasion of Iraq began you had already been in the region for over two years working on assignment. What were the immediate conditions in Baghdad like that you can remember, at least as far as the press and photography camps were concerned? Were you and your colleagues viewed with any amount of suspicion by Iraqi citizens, as though you might simply be extensions of the American led coalition that was now dropping bombs on them? Were your pre-existing relationships challenged by the onset of war?
Saman: In the lead up to the invasion we had to work under the tight control of the Iraqi Ministry of Information. We could only stay in certain hotels, and were assigned official minders from the Ministry that accompanied us everywhere, and determined what we were able to photograph and report on. Unable to move and report freely, we only got to see what the regime wanted us to see, and for the most part that was propaganda designed to show the western international press that the Iraqi people supported Saddam and were ready to fight against the American invaders. As the start of the war seemed inevitable, the mood on the streets of Baghdad, and that of our minders, grew more tense with each passing day. Fighting positions and barricades started to pop along major city intersections, some business owners boarded up their shops in anticipation of airstrikes, and groups of soldiers riding in the back of pick-up trucks with mounted machine guns could be seen speeding across the city. On the eve of “Shock and Awe”, the much anticipated and made-for-tv bombing campaign of Baghdad, an epic sandstorm engulfed the city in a ghostly orange light that accentuated the thick air of unpredictability. There was a turning point in our relationship with the minders, and that occurred in the war when the first cruise missiles hit targets in Baghdad. I was with a group of photographers on the roof of the Palestine Hotel trying to get a vantage point from where to photograph the explosions on Saddam’s palace compound across the Tigris river. Suddenly, a group of minders arrived and immediately started chasing us off the roof, some photographers were beaten and their cameras and tripods thrown off the roof of the hotel.
ASX: I imagine that in the early stages of the war the demand was for stories and images that would reinforce the idea that the United States and its allies were on the right side of history, that the military was a liberating force and that the people of Iraq would welcome them with open arms. What was the general tenor of, or framing for, the assignments you were first receiving from western news organizations after the war began in earnest, and how did you manage to complete them now that, I presume, you had fewer local contacts or sources who would help you? Put differently, was it the case, or could you tell, rather, that you were being asked to produce work that could then be fit into pre-existing narratives about the war, what would essentially be called propaganda? Is that something you were up against? If so, how did you work around it?
Saman: I’m not sure if that demand was so overt. In fact, the decision by some American news organizations to allow their staff to remain in Baghdad and cover the start of the war from the Iraqi capital was to the few of us that stayed an important sign of defiance against the direct warnings from the US government for all western journalists to leave, a sort of confirmation of our journalistic independence and commitment to tell the story from the “Iraqi side.” However, due to the circumstances, most of us succumbed to covering the spectacle, and delivered images reinforcing what the American military must have imagined when they called the operation “Shock and Awe”. Our early photos taken from the Palestine Hotel roof showed Saddam’s palaces on fire and the overwhelming power of dozens of cruise missiles hitting their targets across the river from us. Those early images did not show the uncertainty and fear that Iraqi families huddling in Baghdad felt that night, they did not grasp the significance of that moment for Iraq, the US, and the world. Regardless, those images were published the next day on the cover of every major newspaper and magazine, effectively framing the public perception of those early first days of the war.
There was also a need to prove myself that early in my career, so I chased dramatic photos of violent conflict, the kind that make a war photographer’s career. But events along the way began to complicate my role as a chronicler of the war, and that is when I began to ask questions and assess my work as a photojournalist. During the first weeks of the invasion I was arrested by Saddam Hussein’s secret police and held in Abu Ghraib prison for eight days. There in the darkest cells of Saddam Hussein’s terror apparatus, the sounds of men being tortured filled the hallways, and their battered bodies were occasionally paraded past my cell in the foreigners’ wing of the complex, making me wonder if I would be next. Never had my field of vision been more limited, more controlled than it was in prison, but ironically it was here that I got a glimpse of something usually hidden from view. My role had changed, I was still a witness but without a camera. I was still a journalist but now a prisoner. I had become a character in the hidden narrative of the war.
Experiences like this one marked the start of a 20-year evolution of self-awareness, that I hope is reflected in my book, and my understanding of what the philosopher Judith Butler has called “the framing of the frame.” Butler wrote about the underlying systems of state power that define the frame of our narratives, that dictate what is kept in or out of it, and ultimately determine “which lives count as human and as living, and which do not.”
2019, Mosul, Salahaddin Province. A family returning to their destroyed home to salvage their belongings © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos
ASX: I do think that self-awareness is reflected in the book quite significantly, and not only in its sequencing and the way you critically repurpose official military language, but also in what your pictures emphasize and how they are constructed. That is, they hardly ever seem reducible to simple dramatic actions that would allow us to easily narrativize them. Instead, and please allow me a bit of generalization here, they often seem provisional rather than definitive, as though they were pieces of continual investigation or discovery. The graphic complexity in your pictures also, I think, aids in this, because we are not compelled to look at one place and one place only, and you rarely, if ever, use a shallow depth of field to isolate a subject from its environment. Everything is important.
Before we discuss your book in earnest, I wanted to ask about embedding, and whether or not you worked within that system at all once the war began. In his book Killing for Show: Photography, War, and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq, Julian Stallabrass talks about how embedding during the Iraq war became increasingly more common and more necessary for journalists and photographers as the war developed, and specifically after the circulation of the Abu Ghraib photographs. After this happened, he argues, and as the occupation began fomenting resistance and sectarian conflict, the level of distrust held by the Iraqi citizens towards journalists and photographers greatly increased, and with it the frequency of violence directed towards them as well. So, in spite of the inherent limitations and restrictions that are part of embedding with a military unit, it became more and more necessary, if for no other reason than added security and protection. Does any of this ring true with what you experienced while working in Iraq as the war went on, even if you didn’t embed with the U.S. military?
Saman: Indeed, as the resistance against the US occupation, and the sectarian strife that ensued, became more violent and widespread, there were large parts of the country too dangerous for western journalists to visit without the protection of US troops. Embedding was transactional, journalists exchanged access to “the action” for the protection afforded by the military, but this dynamic was inherently biased, and it resulted in images that perpetuated a narrative seen from a very particular point of view, that of the group of soldiers with whom we were embedded. During my time in Iraq I had the opportunity to embed on a few occasions, and it was always a fascinating experience being able to confront the war and surroundings from that unique perspective, with a particular language and vocabulary deployed to obscure the contradictions and ambiguity that is inherent in war.
That said, during my time in Iraq I worked mostly unembedded, despite the challenges and risks. It helped that being latin I could sit in the back of a car and not stand out as western, but even so there were many times when I was not able to leave the compound where I lived, or get out of a car while visiting certain neighborhoods, and this also had a clear impact on the stories that I was able to tell.
ASX: I’d like to shift the conversation onto your book, Glad Tidings of Benevolence. The book has a clear structure, which is not to say a simple one, in that chapters are clearly delineated from one another. However, they are not strictly chronological, even if certain pictures contain a more explicit timestamp than others (here I’m thinking of the pictures you took of the very first air strikes on Baghdad). You also draw heavily upon military documents, training manuals, declassified and mostly still redacted government communications, maps, and so forth. Putting aside for the moment the way you use language throughout, and here I am not simply talking about captions, can you talk about how you approached the sequencing and structure for this book? Did the making of it produce any new ideas or ways of thinking about the material you worked with, and thus about your experiences and the events they describe?
Saman: The photographs in the book cover roughly 20 years of work, but I was not so much interested in the chronology of the main events that transpired during this period in Iraq. Rather, I wanted to group pictures together around a number of recurring themes, such as displacement, loss, the effect of war on the land, the shifting roles of victim and perpetrator, the formation of narrative in war, and the creation of memory. Organizing and going through my archive picture by picture was also revealing, in the sense that I was able to see clearly an evolution in the way that I was seeing and the pictures that I was taking. For example, some of the early photos from 2002 and 2003 represent a one-dimensional reaction to events that I was witnessing, without necessarily questioning or challenging the nature of those events. Over time, I was drawn to capturing alternative frames, those quieter moments defined by nuances and ambiguities that center human dignity, and that give face to the people that I was photographing in the context of the immense challenges they were facing.
The structure of the book is punctuated by a dialogue between my pictures and text, which includes quotes from political and military figures, lists of killed Iraqi civilians and US coalition military personnel, an edited log of military operations, handbooks for soldiers, redacted official transcripts and pop culture references that reflect a sinisterly ironic lexicon of war. The pairings of text and photograph are meant to provoke questions about narrative formation in war: Who has the power to narrate a conflict? Who determines the parameters of the frame? Which crimes or victims will be visible, and at the expense of what? Some pairings reveal a clash between my own visual representation of the conflict and official discourse, while others provide unexpected intersections or bridges. But ultimately, the guiding concept of this project was not to represent an objective account of the Iraq war against which to compare the texts. The book grapples with my own role and power as a narrator – particularly one with access to foreign publications – and the biases and limitations inevitably embedded in my work. As the war revealed more of its ambiguous, uncertain and confusing nature, it became harder to live up to the expectations associated with the role of a journalist — being the perennial, objective, distant observer, the uninvolved witness.
ASX: Let’s focus for a moment on your use of language, specifically the way you draw upon and recontextualize the language of government and the military, interviews and testimonials, and pop culture at large, to create a kind of split consciousness, or reflexivity, that runs through the book.
The language of government and power that we come into contact with is strikingly at odds with what your pictures show and describe, and even more so with the way they do it. These sources of language (politicians, to take one example, or military texts, to take another) exude certainty and control –- they mean to simplify the war and deny its contradictions. By contrast, your pictures are not definitive or authoritative. They show rather than declare. They are open to textual interjection and to being reframed by additional images. Perhaps this gets at something fundamental in the difference between the way language constructs reality and how pictures do.
Can you talk about your approach to combining image and text in a general sense, and then more specifically how you created the balance between the two in this book? How do you think about the relationship between image and text in your work and then as it pertains to conflict photography or photojournalism more broadly?
Saman: Early on in the process of making the book, while I was gathering military transcripts and other official documents pertaining to the war, I became fascinated with the way language was co-opted by the US military in order to shape a particular narrative of what was going on. One of the most telling examples arised from a list of hundreds of code names for military operations across Iraq that revealed the sinister quality of some of the euphemisms. These operations had names such as “Aloha”, “Devil Thrust”, “Mustang Flex”, “Slim Shady”, “Glad Tidings of Benevolence”, or “Matador”, names that obscured the ugly truth about what went on during these raids, masking the outcome of death and destruction. Equally sinister language was present in the poems written by Saddam Hussein, describing his supporters as the “fountain of willpower, the essence of earth, the pupil of the eye, and the twitch of the eyelid.”
Likewise, I recognized a similar euphemistic quality to some of my photographs, based on my own subjective point of view, and I felt the need to create a dialogue between my photographs and this new lexicon of war. I am not sure if I was looking to strike a balance between the texts and the photographs, but rather my aim was to pair text and photographs to provoke new questions about how narratives are formed in war, to reveal a clash between my own representation of the conflict and official discourse, and at times to provide unexpected intersections and bridges.
Speaking more broadly, I think that the relationship between text and images, and the way that these interactions add context and reflection on such a complex topic as war, is a central feature of the work that has inspired me in the past. I can think of Gilles Peress’ Telex Iran and the dialogue between the immediacy of the written telexes that he was sending back home from the field, or most recently Peter van Agtmael’s Look at the USA and the way his own personal mediations add dimension to his photographs of war.
ASX: Yes, perhaps “balance” was not the most exact way to describe what you do in the book with image and text. What I was trying to focus on was not that there is an equal amount of image to text, but that the communicative capacity of both forms, how each is able to establish its own specific form of description and commentary on the war, seems to be given equal space to develop. That is to say, while images are ostensibly the primary point of emphasis in the book, the presence of text, of many different forms of text, creates a voice that is sometimes parallel to the images and at others adjacent to them.
I’m happy you mentioned those books by Gilles Peress and Peter van Agtmael, because I think a consideration of how they both use text further illustrates the specificity of your approach. To put it perhaps too simply, both Peress and van Agtmael center their own voice through text, around which the voices of others orbit. The narrative thrust of both books is driven by and through their voices, whereas in your book your voice, as expressed through text, is altogether absent, and instead you rely upon the voices of, as we’ve said, “official” sources, whether they be political, military, cultural or otherwise. Because of this what we end up with is a book of multiple voices and perspectives, of claims to truth and authority, all vying with one another throughout the sequence. This seems to reflect the way the narrative about this war was first developed and then as it shifted once public sentiment began to change as well, as war turned into occupation – the narrative was, strictly speaking, never fixed, never monolithic.
Have you received any pushback on, or any challenges to, the book and the suggestions it makes about the narrative of war specifically, and on the conduct of the United States and its allies in their prolonged presence in the region more generally? Is this ever something you worry about? Relatedly, to what extent do you consider the question of audience when making a book?
Saman: Your observation about an author’s voice being the center from where other voices orbit really resonates with me, mainly because it opens up philosophical and ethical questions about the power dynamics between photographer, subject, and audience, especially in documentary photography and photojournalism. Personally, I am weary of allowing my voice and experience as an author to overshadow the lives, histories, and stories of the people that I document. That said, I am also aware of the contradictions and gray areas in which we as authors operate, as I also find it natural for an author engaged in long-term documentation to develop strong personal views based on their experiences that inevitably influence the narrative. In my own case, I think that the main narrative thread of the book, the juxtaposition of multiple voices and perspectives claiming for truth and authority, emerged while reflecting upon certain personal experiences that I had in Iraq.
In the context of the work that I do, I prefer to think of the role of an author as a conduit for other people’s stories, rather than an anchor or a center that is expected to give those other voices meaning.
2003, Baghdad. A boy hunting in Baghdad during a sandstorm © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos
ASX: I’d like to close our conversation by probing a bit further into the concepts of authorship and intent, both as they pertain to your work and also to photojournalism, or conflict photography, more generally. I’m curious to know how porous the boundary is between authorship of one kind as opposed to another – or rather, if you experience it that way at all. What I mean to ask is, has a relationship developed between how you work in the field and how you then conceptualize, edit and sequence a book, or are they separate and distinct? Put differently, has the process of making books produced a change in how you currently make pictures, whether on assignment or otherwise? As for the second concept, I’ve wanted to ask what you hope, or intend, for your books to do once they’re out in the world. Do you think about your pictures and your books in that way?
Saman: Personally, I find the gathering phase, when I’m out in the field photographing, a much less organized and coherent process than when editing and sequencing. The gathering phase for my two book projects took years, and I never set out to make books outright. It was mostly assignment work that kept me engaged and immersed in different aspects of the story. Only in later stages, once the idea of making a book begins to take shape, the way I work can become more focused, dictated by gaps in the emerging visual narrative of the book. That said, it is in the editing and sequencing phase when the concept and visual narrative of the book is finally determined, and when certain single photographs assume different meanings based on their relationship within a sequence of images.
In the case of Glad Tidings…, there is a family history that I hope the book preserves for my children, who are half Iraqi-Kurdish. But more generally, I hope that my books transcend the news events and cycles from which they emerged, and can promote engagement with universal issues related to war, displacement, and injustice, while questioning how narratives are formed, and ultimately how memory is created.
2019, Mosul, Salahaddin Province. Life returns to Mosul after the reign if ISIS © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos
2016, Ramadi, Al Anbar Province. Survivors of the war living amid the rubble of destroyed buildings © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos
2008. Baghdad. Taping of the Colbert Report in Baghdad’s Green Zone © Moises Saman / Magnum Photos