When photojournalist Wesaam Al-Badry, a first-year student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, went to rural North Dakota to photograph a Native American family struggling to stick together in the face of poverty and isolation, he actually moved in with the Thunderhawks for a few weeks.
Al-Badry, 34, didn’t have much money himself, and there wasn’t a nearby hotel where he could rent a room. And the experience of living on the edge of nowhere was familiar to Al-Badry, who escaped Iraq with his family in 1991 and spent two years in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S. and settling in Nebraska.
“I am happy when I am there because I feel like I am at home,” he said. “We talk; we spend endless hours just talking about cultures and traditions. It is that love of community and learning from one another that feels so familiar.”
Over the course of several week- or two-week-long visits, Al-Badry produced a series of evocative portraits of the Thunderhawk family that won him UC Berkeley’s 2019 Dorothea Lange Fellowship, a prize for faculty or graduate students who demonstrate outstanding work in documentary photography and have a creative plan for their future work.
Al-Badry’s photos capture Jen, the matriarch, trying to teach her children and grandchildren traditions of her Lakota tribe, the chaos created when 12 family members live under one roof and the everyday hardships of life on a reservation in the rural Midwest.
“I want people to understand that the struggle is real, that people are living day by day,” he said. “I also want people to understand how important the land is to these people.”