Wesaam Al-Badry
Marianna #XII, 2019/2020
Estimated Value: $2,000

Archival pigment print
24 x 30 inches
Unframed
Edition 1/4
Signed authenticity placard provided by artist.
Donated by the artist, courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York and San Francisco.

Marianna, a multi-media project, is a collaboration between the photographer and the community. Through a combination of investigative journalism and art the project uses archives, audio interviews, photographs, and video to showcase that photography can be elevated beyond illustration. 

The idea for a collaborative project was born from an event that first occurred when I began working in Appalachia: I asked an elderly resident if she wanted to be photographed. She said yes, but also wanted to know if I wanted her to stand next to a decrepit shed on her property. I asked her why she wanted to stand there? She replied that whenever photographers had come to photograph in the past, most wanted her to stand next to those types of buildings. 

This event led to me starting thinking about how photography has a history of perpetuating stereotypes and isolating communities sealed between the cracks. The idea is to break down the stereotypes of the Appalachian “aesthetic.” The project portrays these people as essential members of the community, with a deep historical connection to coal mining and the towns they live in. 

Pennsylvania is the second-largest producer of natural gas in the country, just behind Texas. Marianna is a borough in southeast Washington County, home to more than 1000 gas wells, the most in the state. EQT, the largest gas producer in the United States is quickly and aggressively building all around Marianna. 

Historically, Marianna was once a mining community, and remnants of this remain with a man-made mountain of coal ash. The town itself sits on top of a riverbank. On the other side of the river, a mere 900 feet from Kim Laskowsky’s front door is a fracking site. Come this Thanksgiving, the fracking site will begin its conversion to a fracking “super pad.” A super pad is a site that contains 16 wells, compared to a normal pad which has only 1 well. 

I have been to Marianna. On the one hand, it is idyllic Appalachia with beautiful, wooded forests and winding streams and rivers. On the other, it is a community besieged with problems – from the constant noise and light pollution to rising health problems.

About the Artist:
Wesaam Al-Badry

Photographer and writer Wesaam Al-Badry (b. 1984, Nasiriyah, Iraq) examines Western consumerism’s influence on traditional Muslim Culture. When Al-Badry was seven years old, at the outset of what became known as the Gulf War, his mother fled on foot with her five children, including his three-day-old sister. They arrived at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, where they stayed for four years. In 1994, Al-Badry and his family were relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska. As a young man growing up in Middle America, Al-Badry fiercely felt the disconnect between his experiences in Iraq and the refugee camps, and his new American reality. His series, Al Kouture, reveals the tension between Occidental and Arab-Islamic ideologies. By tailoring and repurposing couture silk scarves into niqabs, Al-Badry investigates female objectification at the intersections of both male and market desires. In exploring the possibilities of assimilation in a vast and polarized world, Al-Badry asks his audience, “Would the Western World accept the niqab if it were on the racks of luxury fashion designers?”

Al-Badry was recently featured in the exhibition Contemporary Muslim Fashions at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, before travelling to Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst. His works were acquired by Stanford University’s Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts and the Toledo Art Museum. Al-Badry will participate in Hank Willis Thomas’ For Freedoms Project. His photographs have been featured in Forbes Magazine, The Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and in campaigns for the UNHCR, the ACLU, and other global organizations. Al-Badry has also worked for global media outlets, including CNN and Al-Jazeera America. He received his BFA in Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and is currently pursuing a Masters in Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Website: wesaamalbadry.com | jenkinsjohnsongallery.com
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Instagram: @wesaamalbadry | @jenkinsjohnsongallery
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