Picking Up the Pieces
With Saddam Hussein’s portraits gone and his buildings bombed,
Baghdad is a city in search of its identity.
By Adam Davidson
Photography by Sean Hemmerle
May 2004
The first time I came to Baghdad was last April, a few days after most
of the city fell to U.S. troops. I drove in at night, down a road still
heavy with gunfights. It was scary but bearable—until I had to stop
my car (there was barbed wire across the road) and in dim light saw
those giant crossed swords held up by massive reproductions of
Saddam’s hands. Then I was really scared. There was something about
that massive self-obsessed testament of personal power that made the
whole city feel alive with terror. For the next few days I saw such
signs everywhere. Saddam’s portraits were still hanging, a few on
every block. His other great monuments—the tomb of the Unknown
Soldier, the many palaces, the huge ministry buildings—grabbed all
visual attention. The new U.S. military encampments—small, ad hoc,
functional, uninspiring—couldn’t compete at all. Baghdad felt
exactly like what it was: a city that had belonged to one man and had
been violently wrenched away. It was a place whose
aesthetic—dictatorial solipsism—had been somewhat dismantled
but not replaced with anything new.
I’ve stayed in the city almost continuously since that first night,
and the Baghdad I drive around in these days feels like a very different
place. The Saddam portraits are mostly gone now, and the palaces and
monuments and looted ministry buildings are just so much visual
background noise. It’s amazing how quickly Saddam’s total
visual domination of Baghdad melted away. Under sanction any building
that was new, bright, or interesting was a direct expression of
Saddam’s power. But most of those buildings are now either
destroyed, burned down, or occupied by American troops who have hidden
them behind concrete barriers. With Saddam’s unifying vision gone,
the many background pieces of the city now come forward. The truth is
there’s so much visual information in almost any glance at the city
that it’s difficult to digest what you’re seeing. All at once
Baghdad is too many things: a typical poor third-world capital; an
ancient place with glorious and decrepit historical remnants; a
commercial center suddenly exploding with new consumer products; a
war-torn, looted mess; a newly occupied city. In short it’s a place
that can’t have anything approaching a unified aesthetic feel
because nobody quite knows what this new Baghdad is yet.
The images that make it onto TV and into newspapers are mostly of the
noisy city center. Baghdad was a small place until about 30 years ago,
and most of the visual clutter is concentrated in a few square miles
along the Tigris River. It’s a wanderer’s paradise: there are
old Jewish mansions, now whorehouses; gorgeous ancient mosques; Ottoman
colonialist masterpieces carved up into tiny markets; and everywhere
broken streets, armed guards, barbed wire, sewage, beggars, vendors.
But most Baghdadis don’t go downtown. Most of today’s Baghdad
stretches out from that center in new neighborhoods that accommodate
Iraq’s recent massive population growth—largely from the
millions of rural Shiites who have come to the city in the past few
decades. These new neighborhoods look like a run-down version of Los
Angeles suburbs: miles of single-family homes made of concrete laid out
along grid-straight streets. And here the aesthetic is the flip side of
Saddam’s self-aggrandizement. The poor and middle-class
neighborhoods are crowded with small variants of the same concrete box,
designed, it seems, to never catch the attention of passing secret
police. The primary aesthetic is mute anonymity. The rich areas have
ornate homes of shiny gaudiness: a massive Tudor barn next to a Roman
temple fantasy next to some Disney-like vision of the Arab golden age.
Here the aesthetic shouts out a proactive defensiveness: “Not only
am I rich, but I’m also powerful and influential enough not to have
to hide my wealth.”
As with everything about the future of Iraq, what this city will look
like is an open question. Will a brave young generation of architects
capture this pivotal moment in Baghdad’s history and design
buildings that honor its past and celebrate its future, like Chicago
after the 1871 fire? Will civil war destroy the place more effectively
than the war did? Or will the billions of U.S. dollars be spent on large
functional office towers and strip malls, making Baghdad as bland and
unspecific as any new suburb?
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A rooftop view shows debris from bombing and Central Baghdad in the
distance. |
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American Black Hawks hovering in the sky above downtown Baghdad. |
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Two American Humvees parked at a checkpoint. |
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The city's Al-Aadimiyah section, including the Abu Hanifa Mosque
(background), where Iraqi soldiers were encamped during the fighting. |
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A celebratory day of pilgrimage for Shia Muslims that was forbidden
under Saddam's rule. |
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Among the first targets struck by U.S. forces were Iraq's communications
facilities including Saddam Tower (above), which housed Iraqi TV
stations, and a communications building in downtown Baghdad whose debris
filled the streets (below). |
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Some of Sean Hemmerle's photographs of Iraq will appear in the show
Moving Walls 9, opening June 10 at the Open Society Institute, in
New York. |
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