Violent, bloody and chaotic; these are the images that come to us from Iraq on a daily basis. But in My Baghdad, now at Irvine Contemporary, local photographer Phil Nesmith presents another view of Iraq, one that captures the quiet moments of the every day.

His photographs are small vignettes, short snippets of life, printed onto glass. They are pieces of time, capturing a small moment in the motion of a waving flag or birds taking off from a wire. The edges of his prints are cloudy and dramatic and his compositions are poignant as well as haunting. In Baghdad Ghost (Wedding Dress), a wedding dress is hung on the side of a street in front of an iron gate by a stack of televisions. The scene is compelling and achingly moving. Nesmith was able to capture this perfect moment during a lull in traffic on the unseen busy street.

Nesmith’s images were taken when he was embedded with soldiers in late April of 2003 for 11 months. Nesmith explained that in 2003, “it was a very different time then.” He was living with the same soldiers that became family and referred to a more hopeful time during the war. He returned to Iraq in 2006 for a shorter stint and talked of his different experience. “It was just harder,” he said.

His process for creating his glass prints stems from his view of memory. He prints on black glass to represent his memories of his time in Iraq. “Glass is fragile, memories are fragile,” Nesmith explained. His technique is a hybrid of processes that were pioneered in the 1800’s. The work on display in My Baghdad contains over 150 years of memory, including the techniques developed in the 1800’s as well as the history of war itself, hearkening back to photographs of the U.S. civil war.