The Winter 2007 issue of Middle East Report will come out in a couple of weeks. It's main focus this time is the politics of youth. As photo editor it was my job to find the best photography we can afford to accompany the articles. Sadly, I discovered that photos of youth (I'm not talking about kids, but 15-24 year olds) largely correspond to the popular image of the region as repressed, stern, and violent.
[Below are some examples of the usual clichés. However, these are all very good photographers, whose work I respect.]
One of the more common images of Middle Eastern youth:
[Spencer Platt/Corbis]
My goal was to find photographs that show youth being youth. By this I mean doing things like going to university or school, working, hanging out with friends, playing sports, engaged in entertainment like amusement parks, picnics, shopping, cafes, and using the internet. While I did find some photos like this, the vast majority instead chose to represent young people engaged in political demonstrations and rallies, religious observances, or as victims of war, poverty and oppression. These images do capture some part of the reality of life in the region, the problem is that these extra-ordinary moments are the dominant image while the everyday is rarely seen.
Another very common image of youth:
[Atta Kenare/AFP]
There are exceptions, of course. For example, there has been much interest in the youth of Iran for years now. Primarily the focus has been on the Tehran upper and middle classes, those who go skiing, shop at high-end stores, and wear fashionable outfits that only barely abide by the Islamic Republics restrictions on dress. Those images have become fairly commonplace. So common in fact as to become already a bit of a cliché. At first this new image was helpful in breaking up the old stereotype about stern-faced youth covered in black chadors or wearing beards, shouting death to America. They showed what some Tehran youth are up to. It's important to see there are plenty of young people who party, play music, flirt, have fun. But how representative of youth in Iran are those photos? As far as I know, it's just one thin slice of the population. In addition to the photos of hip and trendy youth, I wish there were other images depicting a wider range of youth and their various tastes, activities, levels of religiosity, and socio-economic positions.
An example of the sexy young Iranian woman cliché:

[Lynsey Addario/Corbis]
...which is meant to be understood in opposition to this sort of image of faceless women in chadors.
[Rob Howard/Corbis]
Another big exception to the standard picture of Middle Eastern youth as stern, religious and radical is the image of young people hanging out in shopping malls. However, the popularity of this image comes, I think, from a widespread belief in the (false) dichotomy of "traditional" versus "modern." It seems editors and viewers get some sort of satisfaction from seeing a supposed contrast between men and women in modest dress and veils wandering past global fast food franchises or international brand name stores in the sleek, familiar space of a mall.
An example from Bahrain:
[Spencer Platt/Getty]
I think the problem lies in that feeling of familiarity that is found in the popular images of hip youth and mall goers. My guess is that these newer images are popular because they seem to contrast with what outsiders believe is the dominant culture in the region. Perhaps editors choose them because they depict Middle Easterners as familiar and similar to European and American viewers. We can relate. But at the same time they are seen as surprising because of the usual image of the region.
Unfortunately, what gets lost in this search for the familiar (or its opposite -- looking for the image of religious extremism) is a whole range of other people and experiences. One article in the next issue is about youth in the southern suburb of Beirut, an area called Dahiyya. It's the neighborhood that got a lot of press coverage last summer because Hizballah's media and other offices are located there. During the war Israeli airstrikes took out many residential/commercial buildings there. But this article is about something else entirely. It discusses how youth in this mostly Shiite area figure out what are Islamicly appropriate modes of entertainment for themselves, which is defined differently depending on the individual. Many of these religious young people want high quality, interesting places to spend time and see friends but they don't want the alcohol, popular music and certain norms of behavior between men and women that are present in cafes in other parts of Beirut. The authors discuss a variety of places these youth are comfortable hanging out, like certain sports clubs, sleekly designed internet cafes, segregated beaches, restaurants, an amusement park and a mall.
Searching for photos of youth in the Dahiyya, however, I could only find pictures of them in Hizballah rallies, listening seriously to Nasrallah's speeches, or sadly searching for belongings in the midst of the rubble after last summer's war. Granted, photographing In the Dahiyya isn't easy. The dominant news story, which shapes what editors want, is about Hizballah and the war. (I found very few photos from before the war, no one was interested at that point.) The other difficulty is gaining access. Hizballah controls journalists' visits, many don't get permission from the party to photograph in the area, and people are at times suspicious of a photographer's intentions.
But even knowing the difficulties, I can't help but be frustrated. Observant young Muslims (and indeed youth across the Middle East of all sorts) are as animated, smiley, independent and intelligent as
any teenagers and yet they are rarely represented this way.
Two examples of images depicting youth in their everyday reality:

[Alexandria, Egypt. Mark Henley/Panos]
[Algiers, Algeria. Giacomo Pirozzi/Panos]
It
seems that as a young person in the image world that represents the Middle East you are either
provocatively pushing the bounds of conservative, traditional society
(such as Tehran beauties, Beirut nightclubbers and consumers of "western" brands) or caught up senselessly in religiously-inspired politics and extremism.
These categories and assumptions
need desperately to be challenged by image-makers and image-buyers.
There are certainly photographers who are thoughtfully depicting the nuances of
the real Middle East, but they also need to make a living licensing
their work to magazines, newspapers and agencies that are often still
stuck in these invidious ways of imagining the region. One photographer I spoke to here in Beirut who does good work said he was shocked as he looked through his own archive trying to find photos of youth involved in normal, everyday activities. He found very little.
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