Emily Garthwaite: Photojournalism, Projects and Published Work

Emily Garthwaite is a British photojournalist and writer whose work has been built almost entirely around Iraq, the Kurdistan Region and the rivers and mountain routes that cross them. She works in long stays rather than assignments, and the projects that follow tend to run for years. She presented work in London on 28 September 2018, at a point when her pilgrimage series Road to Arbaeen had just been exhibited in Italy and the United States.

Background and approach

Garthwaite holds a master's degree in documentary photography and photojournalism from the University of Westminster. Her own site describes a practice centred on coexistence, cultural memory and environmental storytelling, carried out through long-term immersive projects, and lists photography, writing, public speaking and documentary film as parts of the same work. She is a Leica Ambassador, and her site also lists her as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.

She has walked more than 1,500 km across the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and co-founded the Zagros Mountain Trail, described on her site as the region's first long-distance hiking route. She continues to build contemporary archives with the Kurdistan Centre for Arts and Culture.

Tears of the Tigris

Her best known project follows the Tigris from its source in Turkey to its mouth in Iraq. In 2021 she travelled the river source to sea by boat, roughly 1,900 km through Turkey, Syria and Iraq over about three months, alongside the writer Leon McCarron and a team of international and Iraqi environmentalists. She returned to the river in Iraq in 2023.

Tears of the Tigris has been shown as a solo exhibition repeatedly since then. Her exhibition record lists it at the Iraq Pavilion at EXPO 2020 in the United Arab Emirates in 2021, at Leica Gallery Mayfair in London and at Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan in 2023, and at Géopolis in Brussels and Cosmopolis in Nantes in 2024. The series was shortlisted for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2024 and shown in the award exhibition at the Ernst Leitz Museum in Germany.

Photographs from the river work also appear in Wounded Tigris, Leon McCarron's 2023 book about the same journey.

Other projects

• Road to Arbaeen (2018). Work on the Arba'een pilgrimage in Iraq, exhibited at Galleria Centofiorini in Italy and Leica Gallery Bellevue in the United States.
• Guardians of the Zagros (2022). A solo exhibition at the Banff Centre in Canada, drawn from her walking work in the Zagros mountains and her photography of Bakhtiari nomadic life.
• Documentary film. She directed The Mosul Diver for SRF in 2024 and The Price of Oil for ARTE in 2025.

Publication and recognition

Her photographs and essays have been published by National Geographic, The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, GEO, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel and Le Figaro. Her writing appears in The Best British Travel Writing (2022), and her pictures in American Photography 38 (2022), Women Street Photographers (2021) and several Wildlife Photographer of the Year titles.

Her site records recognition from Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the Visa d'or at Visa pour l'Image, Prix Photo Terre Solidaire, the Goldziher Prize and the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards, and nominations for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the BarTur PhotoAward and the National Magazine Awards. The Goldziher Prize recognised her in 2023, and its page treats the river work, the Zagros Mountain Trail, the Bakhtiari and the Arba'een pilgrimage as parts of one continuing project on the region.

Why the long stay matters

Garthwaite's work is a useful case against the news trip. A three-month boat journey produces something a week of coverage cannot: the river's whole length, the people along it and the environmental damage in sequence rather than as isolated scenes. Returning in 2023 turns a single expedition into a record of change. The trade-off is that this way of working needs funding before publication rather than after it, so the exhibition list above is also a funding list.

Other photojournalists working on the Middle East and on environmental subjects appear in our speakers index, and the previous talks archive lists the London programmes between 2017 and 2020. The rest of the profile pages are in the events archive.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, with its venue, or with Emily Garthwaite. Information on this page comes from the published sources linked above.