BAGHDAD — “One day Baghdad will go back to its glorious times of beauty,” Hussein Motar, an engineering student and photographer, told Al-Monitor during Baghdad Walk, a narrative walking tour and exhibition about the Iraqi capital. “We are trying to tell the history of Baghdad and raise our voices, to reach the government, to make some major adjustments and changes in historical places destroyed or abandoned.”

Motar chose Rasheed Street, one of the main thoroughfares in downtown Baghdad, as the location to exhibit his photographic project. The street dates to the Ottoman era.

“It took me seven months to take all 20 pictures,” Motar told Al-Monitor. “I first chose 20 old images of Baghdad, and then I took the same ones in 2018. I tried to take them from the same angle as the old photos. I also contacted the families of some people in the old pictures, to visit them and tell them about my idea. It’s not only the photos that are brilliant but the stories behind them.”

Walking along Rasheed Street with other emerging Iraqi artists, as well as passers-by and journalists in tow, Motar stopped at the site of each image and at every historical place to explain the story behind them.