LEAVE AND LET US GO

Alexandra Rose Howland moved to Iraq in 2017 to document the fight against ISIS, then the latest chapter in a near-unbroken sequence of conflicts following the US-led invasion of 2003. This work culminated in Leave and Let Us Go, a seven-year, multimodal project that challenges Western perceptions of Iraq by re-examining how geopolitical events and their impacts are represented.

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The project began during the Mosul Offensive, when Howland created an 88-kilometer panoramic image of Mosul Road, the main artery connecting Erbil to western Mosul. Perched atop a truck, she captured one image every three seconds, later manually stitching them together to form a continuous visual record of the landscape and daily life along a route that linked the heart of the proclaimed ISIS caliphate to a city they failed to capture.

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As the offensive unfolded, a stark divide emerged between what was being documented and the reality on the ground. One day, a soldier sat beside Howland and showed her images on his phone: his wife, his children, his wedding night, his kills. This interaction became so common that Howland began asking to download these first-person accounts. Over the next three years, she built an archive of more than 350,000 images and videos from over 50 individuals across Iraq, spanning from the 1920s to the present day.

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The resulting Leave and Let Us Go comprises the Mosul Road panorama, phone images and videos from participants—including suspected ISIS members—scanned family photo albums, found objects, interviews, and Howland’s own documentation across Iraq. Throughout the process, contributors were actively involved in selecting the images they felt best represented their experiences. As one of the most extensive visual archives of contemporary Iraq, the project upends the notion of the detached photographer and the boundary between observer and observed, returning narrative power to Iraq’s own citizens while examining the intersection of modern conflict and technology.