She came across hundreds of old photographs which appeared to map out the landmass that British men would one day carve out and name as Iraq. She was immediately struck by the sensual, enigmatic beauty of the abstract, monochrome surfaces. Winding river tributaries appeared to her now as swaying seaweed, now as the branches of pale wintery trees. Mountainous ridges appeared as soft folds of fabric, and desert expanses as sheets of paper onto which small geometric objects had occasionally been placed, casting sharply defined shadows and forming mysterious occult symbols and formulas.

As she read about Britain’s policy of policing from the air, imagining the incendiary bombs raining down, the patterned surfaces took on other qualities. The undulating shapes in the rectangles now showed parts of giant, swollen bodies and the networks of rivers were transformed into venous tributaries and scar tissue.

The glass-plate negatives, first held captive first in the British Museum, were now housed in an archaeological institute at a university. Some of the geometric shapes marked ancient remains, or their faint traces. Unable to contain what they’d captured, one entire series of negatives had cracked. The shapes of land surfaces and the outlines of villages were still visible, but through jagged shards. Something was erupting from within the material documentation of events that had occurred many years ago and thousands of miles away.

The archaeologist-pilot Crawford had once used aerial photographs to interpret archaeological features in the landscape. Now, hunched over the images that Crawford had collected decades before, she became aware of herself as an actor within an archive and within a history that was unfinished and of which she was part. She became increasingly affected by the hundreds of mysterious shapes and anxious about her capacity to interpret their abstractions, to manage the seemingly endless proliferation of photographs - and to ever complete her film. Inhabited by images which were the fruit of violence, she inadvertently stepped over into the frame of representation.

Her story began to lean towards the paranoid structure of gothic horror. She wanted to be sure that others who were seduced by the pleasures of distance and abstraction, as she had been, would know that all was not well inside these pictures; that these were scenes of trauma; that we cannot see the bodies half-buried in the sand from here. And yet they see us.

She wondered about all those ruins. Ruins to be remembered and ruins to be forgotten. The preservation of the past and the destruction of the present. ‘What a strange spell these men cast!’ she thought.

Miranda Pennell, 2026