The Iraqi police monitored shops
selling three kinds of things -- cassettes, photographs, and books. | |||
No one was allowed to sell a photograph or take a photograph that showed the tragedy of the Kurdish people. | |||
For example, a photographer in Sulaimania took a photograph of a poor baby with torn clothes and sold it as a postcard. | |||
The photographer was arrested
for selling that photograph. | |||
I never actually took photographs of the fighting in the mountains, but when the peshmerga took pictures they would send them to me and I would develop them. | |||
You cannot imagine how difficult life was here. We were developing the negatives for the peshmerga in the mountains at the same time that we were being watched. | |||
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I had another group inside the house, but as the Iraqi police were searching house
to house, I was afraid that they
would come and find the photographs with me, so I burned them. | |||
Now, I no longer have my shop. | |||
After the exodus, I stopped taking photos. I didn't have any money, and there was no work to do. Most of the photographs that are left are portraits taken for official documents, such as passports and family photographs. | |||
Jabar Abdulkarim Amin Kurdish photographer living in northern Iraq. |