Ongoing · Programme · Heritage
Documenting endangered Iraqi cultural memory with photographers who keep their own copyright and are paid for the work.
EVE runs an ongoing heritage-documentation programme pairing established Iraqi photographers with a fellowship of emerging documentarians, producing a catalogued archive of cultural memory that is increasingly at risk of being lost.
The programme is directed by Younes Mohammad — a Kurdish-Iraqi photographer whose own work has been exhibited at the U.S. Congress and the United Nations — through the Wena Foundation, and its heritage-selection jury includes Akam Shex Hadi, founder of Shunas Museum.
Fellows are paid a daily stipend that makes sustained documentation economically possible, and they keep their own copyright over every image they produce. Work is catalogued, published under open licence, and preserved on the liiink Heritage module.
1,500
Production-days
5,000
Catalogued images
60
Trilingual photo-essays
“Every photograph we lose to neglect is a photograph a future Iraqi historian will never have.”
Fellows keep their copyright
Published work is released under open licence for research and educational use, while original copyright remains with the photographer who made it — a deliberate choice to make the archive durable without dispossessing the people who built it.
