Portland photographer Jim Lommasson is a storyteller. He has two documentary books under his belt, Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice, and the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms and Oaks Park Pentimento, and is currently working on two ongoing photography series. The first is Exit Wounds,
a traveling exhibition and book project through which Lommasson
highlights the effects of war on soldiers returning home from Iraq and
Afghanistan. His second project, What We Carried, which opens
this week, takes a look at war from the other side, by documenting
precious belongings of Oregon Iraqi refugees, including the handwritten
stories they inscribed on the images.WW: Why did you choose to photograph the belongings of Iraqi refugees?
Jim Lommasson: What We Carried is the flipside of
the soldier stories. I’ve been hearing from soldiers about their
experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many of the soldiers came home
and had a completely opposite view of why they went there. Some of those
people who originally went to fight for America have now come back and
are ready to overthrow the government that they originally went to fight
for. That’s such a dramatic, 180-degree worldview change. I thought, I
really need to hear from the people in those countries who were caught
in the crossfire, and I knew there were a certain number of Iraqi
refugees coming to Portland.... I feel like we don’t know these people,
just like we don’t know the soldiers that we send to war.
How did you go about depicting their stories?
I started thinking, what if I didn’t
photograph people and I photographed the things that they brought with
them? When you leave, you don’t often have the opportunity to rent a pod
and put all of your belongings in it. You leave sometimes with a kid
under each arm, a passport, a family photo, a Quran or a Bible, and
you’re off to Jordan.... So people showed me their family photo or
whatever, and I photographed it on white, made a print and gave it back
to them and asked them to tell me why this was one of the few things
they brought with them.
What was your experience in letting much of the project out of your hands?
Every time I get back one of these
photographs that an Iraqi has done something to, it just blows me away
with their sense of freedom.... A 60-year-old anthropologist brought her
books to reconstruct the history of Iraq going back 60,000 years. She
painted this beautiful ancient calligraphy over the picture of the book
that I had photographed. How amazing, how humbling.
Who are these people? Why did they leave?
Most of the people I’ve interviewed have
been in Oregon for less than four years. People have left because life
is just so hard in Iraq.... [One refugee,] Samir, he painted portraits
for Saddam.... After Saddam was gone, he did portraits for American
soldiers. He wanted to get out of Iraq, so he ended up going to Turkey.
It took him five years of paperwork to try to get out of Turkey.... So
he paid some smugglers to smuggle him out in a shipping crate. They put
him in the crate, screwed it down, gave him a can of oxygen, and he was
theoretically going to be shipped to Italy.... It’s hard for me to
breathe just talking about it.
SEE IT: What We Carried is at Launch Pad Gallery, 534 SE Oak St., 427-8704. Oct 7-29.
