Background information
"Alexandra Rose HOWLAND began her project 'Leave and Let Us Go' in 2017 after moving to Iraq to discover a country she had grown up hearing about in the news. She was 11 when the Twin Towers were attacked and the conversation permanently shifted to the War on Terror, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and to Americans being under attack. What she found when she landed was a country entirely different than what she had expected and she became intent on creating work that challenges how geopolitical events are presented. She first made an 88km panoramic image of Mosul Road, the main highway connecting Erbil, the closest major city to avoid capture by ISIS; and Al Nuri Mosque, the proclaimed centre of the Islamic Caliphate. At the height of the Mosul Offensive, she sat on top of a truck creeping along the road and took one image every three seconds and manually stitched each image together. After completing this project, she continued on to cover the Mosul Offensive, reconstruction after the war, IDP’s (internally displaced persons), environmental shifts, and daily life across the country. On one of my first days on the frontline, an Iraqi soldier came and sat down next to her flipping through his phone sharing pictures; his kills, his wife, his children, his university graduation day, his wedding night. This story repeated itself so often she began asking to download these photos. Over the next three years, she have collected roughly 350k images and videos from over fifty different people across Iraq. From selfies to photos of loved ones to videos on the frontline, this work presents a candid look into the daily life of Iraqi people as seen through their eyes." (© Alexandra Rose HOWLAND)
Content
'Leave and Let Us Go' by Alexandra Rose HOWLAND is a photo volume with 340 pages, six pages are fold-outs.The photographer composed the juxtapose of her own photographs with photographs from the inner Iraq collage-like. So it feels like a diary because of the used found picture and text material and very believable, contary to many photographs from Crisis areas.