Wesaam Al-Badry and Clara Shuku Mokri among winners of the 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund

Wesaam Al-Badry (’20) and Clara Mokri (’21) are among the winners of the 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund, an initiative providing financial support to encourage artists at formative moments in their careers. Started in 2021 and made possible by Google Devices and Services in partnership with Aperture magazine, the second season of the Creator Labs Photo Fund supports thirty artists working in photography and lens-based practices with a one-time $6,000 grant.

Clara Mokri. Photo: Skyler Glover (’21)

“The thirty selected artists bring us projects with a dynamic and wide range of approaches, including commentaries on photography’s documentary and archival potential, and intimate explorations of identity and community,” Brendan Embser, senior editor of Aperture magazine said in an announcement. “Aperture’s editorial team recognizes critical rigor animating the work by each of these artists, reaffirming the role that images play in creating a dialogue with the past and envisioning new possibilities for the future.”

Professor Ken Light, who mentored Al-Badry and Mokri, was thrilled to see their talent recognized yet again. “These are two of the strongest photojournalists to graduate from our program in recent years,” Light said. “They each have a clear point of view in their work and are part of the next generation of photographers looking at social issues, with a deep understanding of journalism mixed with an artistic eye.”

WesaamAl-Badry. Photo: Clara Mokri (’21)

Descriptions and photos courtesy of Aperture magazine.

Wesaam Al-Badry, Amirah Al-Badry, 11, 2022, from the series From Which I Came.

In his series “From Which I Came,” Wesaam Al-Badry seeks a correction to the narrative, created through decades of media coverage and cultural stereotyping, of the violent Arab Other. Born in Nasiriyah, Iraq, Al-Badry is a refugee of the first Gulf War. His life in the United States is a symbol of a cultural and political coalescence that pervades his work. “It’s impossible to say there is one type of Arab,” he says. “So the project came to be, ‘I’m just going to photograph people as they are.’” The resulting photographs depict what one might imagine to be a quintessentially American family with the familiar marks of Al-Badry’s Iraqi heritage. In one photograph, two women wearing abayas sit in plastic chairs on a lawn, the house creeping into the edge of the picture; in another, a young girl in a leotard stretches in the same spot. The Midwestern backdrop underscores a transgressive goal, the statement that Al-Badry’s community needs no introduction and no excuse. “These people don’t see themselves as the Other, they see themselves as them,” Al-Badry says.

Clara Shuku Mokri, from the series آلبالو پلو (Cherry Rice)

Bright reds and blues leap from the images in پلو آلبال”و” (“Cherry Rice”), a family narrative from Clara Mokri focusing on her Iranian cultural heritage from her father’s side of the family. “It’s all a way to connect,” she says. “My parents don’t share a culture, so it was really about getting to experience both cultures intimately from my perspective.” Mokri’s work as an editorial photographer has established the pop of color as a familiar trait, but here it is imbued with a renewed significance in sharing her family’s story. Details such as a Coca-Cola can, brilliantly red over a tray of food, or a man’s denim, a light blue set against a field of wheat, become central points of cultural awareness as Mokri emphasizes the objects and icons that characterized assimilation for her father and his sister, who came to the United States in the late 1970s, during the Iranian Revolution.