Visual resilience: how Iraqi women photographers reframe climate resilience through counter-archiving

Climate change is often narrated through metrics and models. Whilst these are core to understandings of climate change, this paper finds that, in Iraq, local women and communities render environmental harm through memory, intimacy and place. We draw on the experiences of women photographers in Iraq who illustrate climate change on communities through photography work. We find that the photographers enact what we label ‘visual resilience’, where they use visual tools to communicate climate change and the need for action. Specifically, we observed how (1) the photography work of Iraqi women photographers makes climate change experiential, personal and emotionally resonant, rooting climate change resilience in the human and cultural spheres, (2) the use of photographic storytelling produces a counter-archive of climate change impacts in ways that decentralise what ‘counts’ as legitimate evidence, beyond a national-level top-down discourse, and (3) the photographers’ positionality as women enables them to gain trust and access to other women’s experiences of localised climate change. Our paper reveals how women photographers’ capture of local women’s climate change experiences brings a gendered perspective to cultural dimensions of climate change communication.