As a child growing up in Iraq at the start of the Gulf War, Wesaam Al-Badry was kept awake at night, afraid of the sound of planes flying overhead, and the violence and destruction sure to follow. At the age of seven, his family fled the country after their village was attacked, ending up in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. It was in this camp that he first picked up a camera, becoming familiar with how to frame and compose shots, even though he didn’t have any film. After four years, his family was relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska, and moved into a rundown apartment. But as Al-Badry recalled in an interview with PBS NewsHour, “To me, it was beautiful … people don’t understand … having running water and a good night’s sleep … just changes a lot.” Still, he felt the disconnect between his experience as a refugee and his new home. Al-Badry’s parents couldn’t afford the fees for a photography class in high school. So he didn’t pick up a camera for the next 15 years — and then he took a night course at a local community college. His experience with displacement would go on to shape Al-Badry’s work as an investigative, new media journalist and interdisciplinary artist. Behind the camera, he captures — with dignity and love — images of marginalized, oppressed, and forgotten people and their struggles. His work also focuses on the Middle East and the North African diaspora, specifically on how representations of the region’s popular culture appear in Western media.
Al-Badry has worked for CNN and Al Jazeera America. Exhibited in major museums, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Atlantic, among other publications. He has been awarded the John Collier Jr. Award for Still Photography, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship, the Jim Marshall Fellowship in Photography, and the National Geographic Society fellowship, as well as grants from the Magnum Foundation and the Emerson Collective. He is currently a fellow at the Center for Contemporary Documentation.
Instagram: @wesaamalbadry
