The introduction of the portable Kodak camera revolutionized the way Arab publics viewed themselves. It was likely for this reason that British colonial authorities maintained strict regulation against the purchasing and operating of the photogravure machine necessary for local publishers to reprint the images. Those who owned the capacity were limited by strict censorship code prohibiting, among other things, representation of public demonstrations. Drawing on research conducted, in part, for a recent book--The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz (1952-1967)--this paper looks at the evolution of a powerful political voice from the 1930s, through the lens of his photography. Trained as a lawyer in Istanbul, Kamil al-Jadriji would return to Iraq in the early 1920s, becoming, in 1933, editor of the country’s main oppositional newspaper, al-Ahali. In 1947, he helped found the Iraqi National Democratic Party, which spearheaded a major push for independence in 1952, half a decade before the military Coup of Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim. Although his photography (assembled by the Royal Photographic Society of Bath) never appeared in al-Ahali, the aesthetic and subject matter of his images delineated a yet more compelling and urgent dimension to the already prescient language of his political doctrine. As I discuss here, al-Jadriji’s Kodak images remain among the oldest available by a local photographer in the Middle East. They exist today as an invaluable index of the struggle for collective identity in Iraq and of a social revolution deferred.