Youlena Zaia fled Iraq for Syria with her children in 2005. Three years later, they fled again to the United States. It was her daughter’s idea to bring the photo album—it mostly contained pictures from the 1980s, when Zaia was working as an engineer on the Haditha Dam. Now they’re the only tangible evidence that remains of Zaia’s old life in a world that no longer exists, when an Iraqi Christian woman could wear pants and work on a major construction project and go fishing in the Euphrates River after hours.
Lommasson decided he would start a new project on the model of Exit Wounds: portraits of refugees and 1,000-to-3,000-word oral histories. He met with Iraqis and took their pictures and recorded their stories, but for some reason, the project wasn’t coming together the way he thought it should.
There was a wide variety of objects. Many of the refugees, like Youlena Zaia, brought photographs. Baher Butti took a family picture and circled each of his siblings and wrote down where they are now; their mother is dead, but Butti doesn’t know in which country she’s buried.
Lommasson has photographed between 120 and 130 objects so far; 20 of the photos are in “What We Carried.” (There are ten more in the pedway.) The exhibition hangs in a gallery in a narrow open hallway on the second floor of the Illinois Holocaust Museum. If you look over the railing, you can see down into the museum’s permanent Holocaust exhibit and witness some of the objects refugees brought to the United States more than 60 years ago. The parallel—and the reason the exhibit has found this particular home—is obvious.
“The barrier between Iraqis and Jews needs to be let go of in order for Iraqis to thrive in American society,” says Youngberg. “This is an opportunity to start bridging those walls.”
