When Richard Mosse traveled to Iraq last spring, he was intrigued by paradoxical scenes of U.S. troops living in Saddam Hussein’s former palaces: weight machines in a courtyard, makeshift dorm rooms in a marbled hallway and barbecue grills overlooking an artificial lake that the dictator once stocked with fish.

“I was surprised at where the U.S. war machine had situated themselves,” Mr. Mosse said. “Before, these palaces were seen as places of fear. I read that people would actually avert their eyes when they drove past them.”

Richard Mosse Al Faw Palace in Baghdad.

After receiving seed money from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund, Mr. Mosse spent a month taking large-format photographs of six palaces. Although the Iraqi government hasn’t conducted an official count, it believes that Mr. Hussein built hundreds of them, ranging from massive complexes to smaller structures.

Dust storms and threats of roadside attacks made access difficult for Mr. Mosse, who spent much of his time on U.S. military bases, waiting and asking for troops to escort him out. He likened the down time to “being in prison, ticking off the days.”

But once on site, Mr. Mosse sometimes had as little as 10 minutes to shoot, which meant he had to run on intuition and to choose his subjects prudently. “Working that fast with an architectural camera on a tripod will give you palpitations,” he said.

Mr. Mosse, 29, has an M.F.A. in photography from Yale. He uses a second-hand, Phillips 8-by-10 Explorer camera, and in less stressful environments, can spend hours working on a shot. “This camera doesn’t distort the way other wide-angle lenses might,” he said. “There’s just something very respectful about the way it captures the details of a space.”

Some of the details he noticed at Al Faw Palace in Baghdad and the Birthday Palace in Tikrit included shaky construction. Tiles were falling and walls sagged and cracked. Some of the chandeliers were actually faux crystal.

While a small number of palaces are still occupied by U.S. forces, the majority have gone back to the Iraqi government. The rest will follow by December 2011, the deadline for final American withdrawal.

But for now, there’s still debate on exactly how the buildings should be reused. Everything from museums to government buildings and tourist hotels is being discussed. In Babylon, visitors can already tour one of Mr. Hussein’s looted, abandoned retreats for a small fee.

Richard Mosse Uday’s Palace in Jabal Makhul.

Mr. Mosse found himself mesmerized by the emptiness of these same eerie spaces. In the past, he’s photographed the architectural ruins of other war-torn landscapes like Bosnia.

“This type of photography has become almost cliché,” Mr. Mosse said. “But I felt that there would be something fascinating in pushing it into the realm of kitsch.”

At Uday’s Palace in Jabal Makhul, north of Tikrit, he photographed a crumbling staircase surrounded by graffiti-covered walls. In another nearby palace, he found a bombed-out ballroom filled with piles of debris.

“The romantic ruin, empty ravaged spaces, have a long precedent in the history of art,” he said. “These are all expressions of the sublime, and we are attracted to them because they make us feel our own mortality.”