Moises Saman
Moises Saman was born in Lima, Peru, in 1974 to a mixed Spanish and Peruvian family. At the age of one, he relocated with his family to Barcelona, Spain, where he spent most of his youth. He studied communications and sociology in the United States at California State University, graduating in 1998. It was during his last year at university that Saman first became interested in becoming a photographer, influenced by his studies in visual sociology, and the work of a number of photojournalists who had been covering the wars in the Balkans.
Saman blends traditional conflict photography with a deeply personal point of view. For more than 10 years, he has been concerned with the humanitarian impact of war in the Middle East, documenting both the front line of daily suffering and the “fleeting moments on the periphery of the more dramatic events.”
He has worked on many editorial commissions, including covers for Time magazine’s Person of the Year (2018), which featured several journalists who had been targeted for their work. For this prestigious assignment, Saman photographed 26 journalists during trips to seven countries, including Myanmar, Bangladesh, Russia, Germany and Mexico.
Saman’s work has received awards from World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year and the Overseas Press Club, and his photographs have been shown in several exhibitions worldwide. In 2015, he was given the highly regarded Guggenheim Fellowship for his photojournalism project on the Arab Spring. In 2023, Saman was named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and he published Glad Tidings of Benevolence, a book that combines photographs and disparate documentation and texts from his time as a photojournalist covering the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and the years following.
Saman joined Magnum Photos in 2010 and became a full member in 2014. He is currently based in Amman, Jordan.
Sinan Antoon
Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi poet, novelist, translator, and scholar. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard, where he earned a doctorate in Arabic literature. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014) and a forthcoming book on the Iraqi poet, Sargon Boulus. He has published academic articles on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, Saadi Youssef, and on contemporary Iraqi culture. His essays in Arabic have appeared in major journals and publications in the Arab world. He writes a bi-weekly column for the London-based, pan-Arab daily, al-Quds al-Araby. His essays and op-eds in English have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Middle East Report, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Arabic Literature, The Massachusetts Review, World Literature Today, and Ploughshares.
Antoon has published two collections of poetry in Arabic and two in English: The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007) and Postcards from the Underworld (Seagull Books, 2023). He has published five novels in Arabic. Translations of his novels have appeared in sixteen languages. His own translation of his second novel, Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (Beirut, 2010) into English as The Corpse Washer for Yale University Press in 2013 was recognized with a 2014 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for translation, was longlisted for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for best translated fiction, and won the 2013 Arab American Book Prize. His translations from the Arabic include Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago, 2011) which won the 2012 American Literary Translators Association Award and a co-translation (with Peter Money) of a selection of Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef’s late work, Nostalgia; My Enemy (Graywolf, 2012). He also translated Ibtisam Azem’s novel, The Book of Disappearance (Syracuse University Press, 2019).
Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 as a member of InCounter Productions to co-direct a documentary, About Baghdad, about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq. 2014, Antoon was the Distinguished Visiting Creative Writer at the American University in Cairo. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin in 2016. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyy and associate professor at New York University.
Faculty Collaborator
Zainab Saleh
Zainab Saleh is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Director of John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College. Her research focuses on subjectivity, nostalgia, belonging, war, empire, citizenship laws, and violence in Iraq and the Iraqi Diaspora. She is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (Stanford University Press, 2021. Winner of The Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award at the Arab American Book Award). Her second book, The Cunning of Citizenship in Iraq: Uprootedness, Erasure, and Reclamation, is currently under review with Stanford University Press. She is a co-editor of Iraq Unruled: Being Between Rule and Revolution, under contract with Edinburgh University Press. Her recent book project, titled A Will to Ignorance: The Commemoration of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in Mainstream Media in the United States, has been solicited by I.B.Tauris/Bloomsbury. Her work also appeared in American Anthropologist, Arab Studies Journal, Anthropology News, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, Costs of War project with Brown University, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Palestine/Israel Review, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
The Ghosts of History is a traveling exhibition organized by Magnum Photos in collaboration with the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College. Support for the exhibition has been provided by The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Haverford College, Magnum Photos, and Haverford College’s Distinguished Visitors Program.
