Photos of the grief that mothers bear
‘Our Sons’ exhibit tells stories of loss by showing belongings left behind
Wesaam Al-Badry was a 7-year-old boy living in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya when the first Gulf War broke out in 1991. His earliest memories are of the shrill, explosive sounds and incomprehensible random violence of a city under siege. Al-Badry fled Iraq on foot with his mother and four younger siblings, seeking refuge at the sprawling Rafha refugee camp in the Saudi Arabian desert. The family lived there in a oneroom tent for the next four years until relocating to Lincoln, Neb.
As the 33-year-old photographer Al-Badry remembers it, amid the cacophony of war — “the loud bangs that don’t stop, the artillery shells raining down” — there was another sound that indelibly affected his outlook on violence and his future life as a visual artist.
“Mothers made a certain wailing when they lost their children, and that sound sticks with you the rest of your life,” Al-Badry said on a recent morning in the San Francisco Art Institute’s quiet second-
floor library overlooking the bay.
Grieving mothers are the subject of his moving, new documentary photo series on view at San Francisco Camerawork. In “Our Sons,” Al-Badry presents emotionally charged portraits of Bay Area mothers who have lost their sons to gun violence.
Al-Badry, who moved to San Francisco in 2014 to pursue his bachelor’s degree in fine arts at SFAI, discovered a love of photography after getting his first camera at age 9 in the Rafha camp. At first, he said, “photography was a way to escape the reality of being in a camp with military right outside the barbed wire.”
However, after years developing his skills as a visual storyteller, including with numerous photojournalism assignments for Al Jazeera America and CNN, Al-Badry’s focus has become far less escapist. His extended photo essays (see www.we saamalbadry.com) on Iraqi refugees, lower Mississippi Delta residents and Lakota families on the Pine Ridge Reservation all reflect Al-Badry’s desire to highlight the dignity and resilience of people, often women, who have experienced violence, displacement and social injustice.
For “Our Sons,”AlBadry has created unusually intimate portrayals of mothers in their homes with their sons’ belongings. Backpacks, baseball caps, childhood toys and even shower products left untouched take on harrowing significance as emblems of a family’s loss.
Al-Badry got the idea for the “Our Sons” project after meeting SalaHaquekyah Chandler at a City Hall gun-violence protest two years ago. Chandler’s 19-year-old son, Yalani Chinyamurindi, was one of four young men slain Jan. 9, 2015, while seated in a parked car in Hayes Valley. (One suspect has since been arrested in an ongoing investigation.)
“I heard this mother screaming, with a very strong, beautiful voice that made everyone stop and listen,” Al-Badry said. He started talking with Chandler about her loss, as well as his own: Al-Badry witnessed numerous killings in Iraq and lost his 16-year-old cousin in a drive-by shooting in Kansas City, Mo.
“I was already thinking about how to tell the story of a person’s legacy through the physical objects they leave behind, but I didn’t know how. Then I noticed that Sala wears clothes that don’t fit— they’re too big. When I asked her about it, she said, ‘They’re my son’s.’ As much as I’ve seen all around the world, that crushed me. There is nothing more powerful than a mother still holding onto her child in that way.”
Al-Badry was reminded of the way his own grandmother mourned the loss of her son, an architecture student who was killed in the Iran-Iraq War. “She held onto his stuff for the longest time, his Madonna cassettes, T-shirts, even his toothbrush.”
The photos in “Our Sons” remind viewers not only of the troubling fact that gun violence is on the rise in San Francisco (40 fatal shootings in 2016, an increase of 15 percent), but also, Al-Badry hopes, of “the universal pain a mother experiences when losing a child, no matter what country, race, ethnicity.”
“Wesaam brings a very interesting kind of outsider’s perspective to his work — as an Iraqi, a refugee and now an art student,” said Ken Light, a UC Berkeley photojournalism professor who met AlBadry two years ago. “His work is probably even more compelling because he has one foot in the art world, the other in the journalism world, and he’s always questioning both approaches.”
Al-Badry remembers as a child seeing photojournalists visit the Rafha camp, which he said laid the groundwork for his complicated feelings about photojournalism. “They’d jump out of their van, take a look at us and then leave. We were basically like a petting zoo. On the one hand, I loved what the journalists were doing, I knew they were getting the story out. But it triggered something I would only understand later, that people shouldn’t be treated as subjects. Dignity is a basic human right. It’s not always respected in photography, but it should be.
“I don’t want people to become numbers, which can happen when you hear about another murder, another loss in our community,” Al-Badry said. “Each of these young men had names, birthdays, a favorite book, a best friend. Dreams.
“David was a great dresser; he had this beautiful swagger about him,” Al-Badry said of David Saucier II, another victim (at age 20) of the shooting that killed Chinyamurindi.
Al-Badry has spent the last year getting to know Saucier’s mother, Pamela, who was photographed for “Our Sons” wearing David’s Warriors hat.
“Look,” Al-Badry said, showing a photo he’d just received from Pamela on his phone. It shows her surviving son seated with his head in his hands, wearing David’s jacket. The text reads: “Missing his brother.”