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Changing Ideas Award
Joshua Stacey, an anthropologist and social researcher from the US, first moved to Iraq in 2004 as a teacher. After many subsequent years living and working in the Levant, he moved back to Iraq in 2018 to conduct field research on the impact of war and conflict for the UN and humanitarian agencies.

The defunding of humanitarian aid and the closure of USAID in early 2025 brought his work to an end. He has since begun to work through a vast personal archive of over 50,000 photographs, a visual diary of everyday life set against the reality of incredible physical and economic violence.

The archive is an act of bearing witness, to the persistence of ordinary life and loss in the midst of extraordinary violence, and to the quiet, stubborn resistence of the normal. His images rarely capture people directly, resisting the all too familiar visual language of crisis and suffering that flatten complex lives into symbols of victimhood, focusing rather on moments and spaces around them.

This photograph was taken of a petrol station between Erbil and Mosul — a route he travelled frequently to speak with people whose lives had been shattered by war. The word "War" is in fact the name of the family who own the station, which rhymes with "far." The irony, however, is inescapable.

The title is a direct quote from Colin Powell's address to the UN Security Council, in which he argued for the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the basis of fabricated intelligence.

Joshua’s work has previously been shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and in 2016 was a consultant producer for a large VSCO funded photography project on the Syrian refugee crisis. He is based in the UK.