From his cramped storefront in Baghdad, Mazin Farouq gets a clear picture every day of what's going on in his country. Actually, he gets dozens.

Farouq runs a photo lab in the Iraqi capital, and he cherishes printing images of smiling subjects and celebrations. Graduations. Weddings. A baby's first steps. Even the occasional racy shot of a frolicking couple.

But these days most of his orders are daily reminders of Iraq's bloody civil war: memorial portraits of "martyrs" or grisly prints of the latest carnage - car bombings and torture victims.

The tiny shop is an open shutter onto Iraq's woes, and Farouq has reluctantly plunged into a somber new specialty.

"Almost all my work now is focused on martyrs," he said. "This job is my mirror to know what is going on in my country. And things are getting worse."

He held up a picture of a little girl with a stuffed animal at her feet and scanned the image into a 10-foot-long photo processor.

"This one just came in today. She was killed by a car bomb with her parents." He shook his head. "The photo is brand new. It was taken just a couple of days before she died."

Farouq once doted over each picture, sharpening contrast, adjusting light and finding the perfect tint for green grasses and blue skies. Now he's fixing the reds in a pool of blood.

The change, he said, began last year, with the increase in car bombs, death squads and gun fights.

Some mourners seek simple enlargements to display at funerals. Others prefer elaborate collages, mixing pictures of the deceased with images of Islamic shrines or scenic landscapes. Most are finished with the victim's name and a short Quranic verse.

"They hang the pictures on the wall to help them remember," Farouq said.

He works closely with Samir Abdul Munim, a Baghdad sculptor who now earns his living restoring damaged photos and creating memorial collages.

One recent job started with a snapshot of a little boy wearing an orange basketball tank top. He is seated proudly atop a plastic tricycle, his scraped knees hugging the sides. Using computer clip art, Munim transported the child's image into a Disney fantasy world. Mickey Mouse dances by a white picket fence. Donald Duck hangs from the handlebars. Dumbo soars overhead. "The Happy Martyr," reads the caption.

Munim doesn't know the boy's age or how he died.

"I don't ask about the details," he said. "I don't want to know."

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