She is the celebrated photographer of southern Iraq, a former prisoner of conscience 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 she turned to photography to support her family – because she had no choice.
“Peasants, intellectuals, I photographed them all,” says the mother of two, her black hijab framing a face marked by life.
“I photographed Amarah in all its beauty – I went deep into the swamps”, south of the city in the Tigris and Euphrates floodplains.
Everyone in the area turns to Studio Samira, be it for a passport photo or a pre-wedding couple portrait.
She tells how she became the first female photographer in Maysan province at just 16, despite family conventions that prevailed in 1960s Iraq, and how political activism led to imprisonment and torture.
“My family has never known any other business – we are all photographers,” says Samira.
Framed photographs on the walls testify to their craft, in black and white or in colors that have faded over time.
She has photo albums showing Iraq as it used to be: women dressed in black balancing huge bales on their heads; a smiling peasant woman in a flowered dress, with braided hair, standing beside a cow; A mother and child fill a pot with water from the river.
– “Society can be cruel” –
Samira’s father was among the first to introduce photography to the province.
“I asked him to teach me the craft, but he said, ‘No, you’re too young. You can’t – society can be cruel,’” she recalls.
But soon circumstances would force him to change his mind. A botched operation left him blind and unable to support his family.
So Samira had to step in.
She started out with the 19th-century daguerreotype method, which used silver-plated copper sheets, but then her father sold some land so she could buy more modern equipment.
“My studio became extremely successful,” she smiles. “Because I was a young woman, I was able to photograph families.”
Samira exploited the norms of a conservative society: male householders preferred to have a female photographer take their photos of their wives and daughters rather than a male.
Bassem al-Subaid is a satisfied client of Studio Samira.
“There isn’t a single household in the whole Maysan province that doesn’t know photographer Samira,” he told AFP.
“My generation met Samira when we let her take our picture,” adds the man in his forties. “It was the previous generation that saw their political activism.”
In 1963, Iraq was being torn apart by revolutions and bloody crackdowns, and the then-teenager had no idea that a communist tract would land her behind bars.
– A source of pride –
After General Abdel Salam Aref seized power in a Ba’ath Party coup, three militants came to Samira’s studio and asked her to mass-produce a poster denouncing the new regime.
She accepts that she had not yet fully formed her own political opinion and was then influenced by her brother’s sympathies.
“There wasn’t a single wall in all of Amarah without a pasted copy of the poster,” she boasts. “It wasn’t a crime – it’s a source of pride.”
An image of herself that she still has today made her famous. It shows her lying on a hospital bed after being tortured in a building in Amarah.
“I screamed so much I thought the whole town would come and save me,” she recalls.
It wasn’t to be: she spent the next four years sick and abused in a Baghdad prison.
She was freed after an international campaign that resulted in the pardoning of several Iraqi political prisoners.
In 1981, she was briefly imprisoned again under the rule of then-dictator Saddam Hussein. And then again 10 years later for a protest in Amarah against the effects of the Gulf War on Kuwait.
Like some other female prisoners, she was pardoned after only a few months.
Today, the photo studio still receives clients and, despite her age, the revolutionary flame in Samira still burns brightly.
She hails the October 2019 uprising sparked by angry young Iraqis trying to hold those in power to account.
“The demonstrators should have turned their movement into a massive revolution to root out corruption and the corrupt,” says Samira.
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