An avid photographer and leader of the National Democratic Party in Iraq, Kamil Chadirji (1897-1968) marked the beginning of his prolific political career by joining Jama’at al-Ahali in 1932. Al-Ahali would eventually term its populist nationalist ideology as Sha`biyyah by the mid-1930s. The son of two-term Ottoman Baghdad mayor Rifat Chadirji and father of the renowned Iraqi architect of the same name, Chadirji occupied a distinct position as a liberal landowning aristocrat that sought the realization of an independent Iraq free from British imperialism. He hoped that this Iraq would usher in an age of benevolent capitalism where industrial and social progress would be distributed in relative proportions among the various urban and rural classes of Iraq. While Chadriji’s political activism has been well documented, it has been treated by historians as independent of his vast photographic archive. This paper argues that Chadirji’s 1930s photographs reveal an attempt to capture an objective reality of social and political life in Iraq that tie into a parallel scientific reformist agenda regarding the demarcation of social classes, land distribution, worker’s rights, housing shortages and negotiating the spatial boundaries of urban Baghdad’s rural frontier. Chadirji’s photographs of ‘typical’ landscapes and figures vacillate between a neo-realist representation of different landscapes of poverty and an anthropological enumeration of peasant types that are differentiated either by their gender, profession, or ethnicity. They also indicate the epistemologies of the elite eye as it represents the ‘great majority’ of the country. While photographs of the Chadirji family are labeled with specific dates and names, most of the typical landscapes and figures remain unnamed, existing neither in place nor in time as forms of raw material waiting to be integrated into a brave new developmental state.