A repeat, for once, of a post of almost four years ago, today. Here’s a young me in Nineveh, in what today is northern Iraq:

And the spiral minaret in Samara, which was very scary to climb:

And a shot I took in Baghdad, after a ministry suffered an explosion (= was bombed, one presumes):

That picture, taken from my room at the al-Mansour Melia hotel, got me interrogated by security… but they were kind enough afterward to actually give me back my developed slide film. I must be the only person to have had their film developed by Saddam’s security men.

The moral of this post: images do not always have to be technically great. Those are scans of faded old prints, made in turn from slide film. And yet, as documents, they are important to me, and irreplaceable. Sometimes having the image is all that counts.