Artist Wesaam Al-Badry’s photographs deal with power, politics, and social issues. We spoke to him to learn more about his process and projects. Here, he shares how he documented farmworkers in California during the COVID-19 pandemic, how his work on Muslim culture and fashion has been misread, and how his practice as an artist is interwoven with his investigative journalism. 

Lee Chang Ming: Your work is featured in the exhibition About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift. How did you arrive in this place, and how has your practice evolved over time? 

Wesaam Al-Badry: I arrived in the Bay Area in 2014 to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. I carried with me the sedimented weight of earlier photography projects rooted in the social and political fractures of the Lower Mississippi Delta, the haunted landscapes of Appalachia, and the sovereign struggles on Indigenous reservations, such as Pine Ridge and Rosebud.

My orientation toward art has always been a confrontation with power. This imperative emerged long before formal education: first in Iraq, where the texture of war shaped my childhood, and later within a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, where my family and I lived for over four years. It was only later, through documents issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, that I learned I had been classified as a political prisoner of war between the ages of seven and 11.

In Frantz Fanon’s terms, the colonized subject internalizes the fractures of empire before language can fully account for them. My practice began from within that fracture, where silence was not absence, but the ground zero of resistance. Art, for me, has never been separate from survival; it is the process by which one metabolizes history and renders visible the violence that otherwise passes for normal.

LCM: Your project Farmworkers looks at agricultural laborers in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m interested in how you documented the undocumented. Can you share how you made this project? 

WA: In March 2020, I began hearing stories about farmworkers and undocumented laborers in Salinas and across California’s Central Valley who were still working in the fields, without masks, without distancing, without protection. At the same time, I learned of undocumented families being evicted quietly — their lives labeled “essential” but treated as disposable.

As an investigative journalist, I felt a deep responsibility to seek out those willing to share their stories. Building trust took time, but it was necessary. I had a moral obligation to document their experiences through photography — to make visible the exploitation hiding in plain sight. Racial capitalism was exposed through bodies bent over the soil.

LCM: In Pomegranate, you continue looking at farm laborers, produce, and conditions of production, but through a different lens. Why did you decide to use infrared film for this project?

WA: I am a storyteller, but not in the passive sense of narration — I create to reframe how we see and who is allowed to be seen. My work constantly searches for new visual languages to confront the political conditions that shape and distort life at its margins.

When I discovered Aerochrome film — a military surveillance technology engineered to render green foliage in vivid red so that human figures might be exposed — I recognized its violent lineage. Originally designed to make bodies visible to the state, I turned it inward, repurposing its gaze. What happens when weaponized technology is reclaimed? When the aesthetic of surveillance is used not to erase, but to insist?

In my project, the question is not simply aesthetic, but existential: Do you see us? Not through the distortions of nationalism, racism, or xenophobia — but with clarity.

LCM: Your work Al-Kouture takes a conceptual approach to visualize tensions between consumerism and religion. Did you have any interesting responses to the work?

WA: I was invited to participate in Contemporary Muslim Fashions not because my work conformed to its framework, but because it resisted it. Al-Kouture emerged from that tension. It is among my most misread works, largely because few engage with its concepts. The project critiques the complicity of Western fashion houses in bolstering authoritarian regimes, ones that commodify, regulate, and weaponize women’s bodies under the guise of cultural authenticity or consumer choice.

Each garment in Al-Kouture is a charged symbol. But the public gaze often returns the work through a colonial optic: the critique is obscured, and what remains is a projection of racial anxiety cloaked in liberal feminism. Yet this misreading is part of the work’s life. As Fanon reminds us, the colonized subject must be prepared for distortion — and still speak. I do not fear the reaction. I welcome it. That the work unsettles is proof it is alive in the discourse.

LCM: You work as an investigative journalist and an artist. How do the two influence each other in your practice?

WA: For me, art and journalism are not separate disciplines but interwoven, symbiotic modes of inquiry — each challenging the limitations of the other. My creative process emerges from the tension between the factual and the poetic. When I make art, I draw from journalistic research — interviews, archives, testimonies — but I do not merely translate data into image. My body, my memory, and my contradictions are embedded within the frame.

Likewise, when I approach journalism, it is not with the illusion of objectivity, but through a consciousness shaped by artistic practice. This practice interrogates the self as much as it does the world. This recursive loop forces a constant reckoning. It reminds me that to see clearly, one must also risk being seen.

LCM: Any upcoming projects you’re excited about?

WA: I just finished the first part of a project titled The Labor of Belonging, which focuses on people in Nebraska. It is my first solo exhibition at the Museum of Nebraska Art.