photo beirut

Representing the Middle East: Looking for the everyday

This past week I participated in an interesting "webinar" about stereotypes in photographic representation of the Middle East through Open-i, which is an online photojournalism education network. Some of the audience members are involved in a World Press Photo course for photographers in the Middle East and North Africa. The other presenters were Alexandra Avakian (National Geographic photographer) and Laura Junka (photographer and PhD student in cultural studies in London). Rula Halawani (photographer based in Jerusalem) was to be there too but unfortunately couldn't attend. Paul Lowe (former Magnum photographer, now with Panos) was the organizer and moderator.

My comments revolved around how in order to understand something of the politics of photographs we need to know how they are constructed by various political, social and cultural processes. I also mentioned how photojournalism over the past 50 years or so has come to more and more emphasize the dramatic moment, the emotional story, and artistic framing and composition.

The problem with this I think is that the quieter moments, the mundane, the everyday, are often left out. But it’s on that level of daily life where the big political and structural forces of oppression, poverty, discrimination, or occupation, affect most people.

Even if we are not in positions to affect the structure of forces that produce the stereotypes, we can still promote the creation of new and different photographic work and find ways to help audiences, teachers, and editors appreciate different visions and visual styles, like Alexandra, Laura and Rula do.

I think Rula  was effective in showing this with her project "Intimacy” where we see the hands of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers handling ID cards and bags at checkpoints.

She doesn’t show faces or dramatic interactions, strong emotions or conflict. She captures the daily, normal tensions of living under occupation, which I think says a lot more about most Palestinian’s lives than photos of boys throwing stones, as important as those are too. Rula's project confronts stereotypes because the images don’t fit into the standard conventions of photos of the Middle East.

Alexandra's photo of a man selling fish in Gaza in 1993 while an Israeli soldier jumps out of his jeep to chase stone-throwing Palestinians also gets at what I'm talking about.

Caption: Gaza City, Gaza, July 1993: A man sells fish while an Israeli soldier jumps out of his truck to chase Palestinians who had been throwing stones. Credit: Alexandra Avakian

Normal life continues during conflict, as seen here, but is often not depicted. This photo is not about contrasts or surprising juxtapositions. We can see from the man's demeanor that this is just a part of trying to live life in Gaza. Israeli military actions were ongoing and closely intertwined with daily life for Palestinians. Alexandra told us that most of the photos in her new book Windows of the Soul: My Journeys in the Muslim World, were rejects -- not used at the time. They are complex and layered, maybe too much so for the prevailing conventions, especially in the late 1980s through the 1990s.

Laura spoke eloquently about the difficulties of photographing Palestinians as neither terrorists nor victims. She spent the summer of 2003 taking photos of Palestinians at leisure as a way to get beyond these tropes. But at the same time she was careful to point out that violence and occupation were still always part of everyone's lives and evidence of that lingers in the photos. She explained that in this photo of a family at the beach there are layers of important information that are only available through explanatory captions.

Caption: Summer at the beach in Gaza, 2003. Credit: Laura Junka

The family has borrowed this tent from their neighbors who received it from the Red Cross when their house was bulldozed by the Israeli government in retaliation for one son's involvement with violent resistance to occupation. Knowing this adds a whole new dimension to the scene, creating a poignant and complex sense of joy mixed with sorrow.

The emphasis in photography of the Middle East is usually on conflict and contradiction, on up-close confrontations between individuals. And of course, as in most photography, there is an emphasis on depicting people.

But there are other visual modes to powerfully depict realities the region. For example see a double page spread in the most recent issue of Middle East Report where we used photos of road blocks by Dirk-Jan Visser.

 

Blocked by Dirk-Jan Visser.

Here is the text I wrote to go with the photo sequence:

"Foregoing the usual depiction of Israel and Palestine as a site of dramatic confrontations between individuals, Dirk-Jan Visser has chosen instead to reveal a more mundane and insidious aspect of Israeli power. Photographing some of the more than 500 road blocks throughout the West Bank in a repetitive and neutral style, without the embellishments of unusual camera angles or clever compositions, these seemingly innocuous places add up to a typology of obstacles, attesting powerfully to an extreme disruption of Palestinian life."

Although stereotypes and conventions of depicting the Middle East are still a problem, I do see more and more photographers pushing the boundaries, looking for new visual styles. Some are also finding ways to visualize structural political problems (the road blocks typology is an example) and to expand the repertoire of images of the region in order to more fully represent the multiplicity of people's identities and experiences.

Misdirected gaze in Jerusalem

Yesterday's New York Times ran an article by Isabel Kershner, "Real Estate Shopping Is Used as Political Theater on Jerusalem’s Contested Ground," accompanied by this photograph by Jim Hollander of EPA.

Caption: New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, center, led a delegation during a cornerstone ceremony in the settlement of Nof Zion, in Jabel Mukaber in East Jerusalem on Wednesday. Credit: Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

Hollander does an admirable job of highlighting that this is a media stunt for Assemblyman Hikind's constituents back home by including the crush of reporters and photographers clustered around him and his delegation. Hikind would likely have preferred a close-up shot framing him as rugged pioneer (note the casual jacket instead of suit and tie) against the rolling hills and Old City of Jerusalem he has so deliberately placed in the background by his choice of position. Choosing to let the strong, warm toned  sunlight fall directly on his face, rather than cast his face in shadow by standing at a different angle, accentuates the sense of righteousness. Hollander punctures this intensely crafted scene by using a wide angle lens to reveal the structure around it -- the media for whom it is staged.

However, the New York Times, despite referring to Hikind's political theater in the title and using a photo that reveals the stage, still plays into the politician's hands. He (plus his point of view) has successfully become the center of the story both visually and in the text.

The Times could have resisted this misdirection of our gaze away from the core issue of land use. For example, the article mentions the Israeli practice of demolishing Palestinian homes for lack of extremely rare and hard to get building permits. The Times had access to striking photos of homes demolished in a Jerusalem neighborhood just the day before. I found a number of good photos in a quick search of agency websites, especially by Menahem Kahana of the Agence France Presse, such as this one.

Caption: Palestinian girls stand amidst debris after Israeli municipality workers partially demolished their family house which was built without municipal permission in the Arab east Jerusalem neighborhood of Whad Kadum on November 17, 2009. Credit: Menahem Kahana/AFP

A photo of the settlement, Nof Zion, in the Palestinian neighborhood of Jebel Mukaber, would have been another good choice that would help inform viewers of the reality of settlement growth. This photo from the Jerusalem Post website's article on Hikind's visit reveals the fortress-like housing that has already been built in Nof Zion.

Credit: Ariel Jerozlimski

The newspaper's website did add a couple of photos by Rina Castelnuovo that were not in the print edition. However, they underplay the demolitions, while more informative images about the toll demolitions take on families were available from the photographer and elsewhere.

This is the photo from the NY Times website.

 

Caption: Palestinians attached a flag to the rubble of a demolished house in East Jerusalem on Wednesday. Credit: Rina Castelnuovo

Another shot of this house by Castelnuovo is available through the agency Redux. (I won't show it since I didn't license its use.) The one on the Redux website shows much more of the house. The angle is not so dramatic and the sky not so blue (it was likely taken from the opposite side of the house) but the effect of dispossession is stronger because the house is recognizable as a dwelling rather than, as in this photo, an indistinct pile of rubble slipping out of the bottom of the frame, and quickly out of our consciousness.

The NYT website includes a second photo that downplays the demolition of Palestinian homes by showing  neighbors watching in a detached manner, as if this was an unimportant incident. But the photo isn't really about the neighbors or about any of the residents, it's about their laundry.

Caption: Neighbors watched in East Jerusalem as a Palestinian home was demolished. Credit: Rina Castelnuovo/NYTimes

It makes an interesting photograph, but conveys little information about the event and its meaning -- just as a staged photo op by Hikind and his group reveals nothing about the actual politics of territorial control and spatial domination.

Apartheid and Beyond - new issue of Middle East Report

The latest issue of Middle East Report is now available. Below is the blurb about the contents. Subscribe to Middle East Report or order individual copies at MERIP’s website. Included in the issue is a photo essay on road blocks by Dirk-Jan Visser in addition to the usual great work by talented photographers.

Middle East Report 253  Winter 2009

APARTHEID AND BEYOND

“Apartheid” is a word bomb. It explodes upon the page, laying bare memories of the regime of racial discrimination that prevailed in South Africa until 1994. So it was no small thing when the South African Human Sciences Research Council issued a report in 2009 concluding that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip is a “colonial enterprise that implements a system of apartheid.” The winter 2009 issue of Middle East Report, “Apartheid and Beyond,” asks what it means that such language is gaining currency and whether it holds promise for bringing peace to the strife-torn land of Israel-Palestine.

As political geographer Oren Yiftachel demonstrates, it is increasingly difficult to speak of separate political systems in the country, a state of Israel “side by side” with a Palestinian proto-state in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. Rather, settlements, bypass roads and walls are creating one Israeli system of rule from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. But different groups of people living under that system have very different sets of rights and prerogatives. Anthropologist Julie Peteet traces the genealogy of the comparison between the post-1967 occupation and South African apartheid, finding in the differences between the two experiences reason to look for a new language to talk about Israel-Palestine.

One key difference is in the realm of labor: Whereas in white-ruled South Africa, the country’s economy was built on the backs of black workers, Israel is no longer dependent on the toil of Palestinians. Economist Jennifer Olmsted measures the growth of unemployment in the Occupied Territories and explains why the jobs have disappeared. There is also severe inequality within Israel, as Monica Tarazi shows in her essay on the dispossession of the Bedouin of the Naqab. Global protest against these inequalities is increasingly taking the shape of calls for various types of boycott. Ursula Lindsey reports on the efforts of Egyptian intellectuals to enforce a cultural boycott, as well as “anti-normalization.”

Also featured: Nazanin Shahrokni inquires into why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not known as a friend of freedoms for women, nominated three women as cabinet ministers; Rola Abimourched investigates working and living conditions for migrant domestic workers in Jordan; and more.
---

Middle East Report is published by the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), a progressive, independent organization based in Washington, DC. Since 1971 MERIP has provided critical analysis of the Middle East, focusing on political economy, popular struggles and the implications of US and international policy for the region.

Yasser Alwan's portraits and Paris Photo 2009

Paris Photo 2009 begins today. Unfortunately I am in Baltimore. The focus this year is Arab and Iranian photography and the central exhibition space is devoted to the Beirut archive I have written about before, the Arab Image Foundation. The Paris Photo website includes a selection of their photos that are on display in Paris.

Tonight a group of photographers will discuss the art photo scene in the Arab world and Iran with guest curator of Paris Photo Catherine David at the Institut du Monde Arabe. Among them is Yasser Alwan, whose wonderful work I have recently used in a publication by the Solidarity Center called "The Struggle for Worker's Rights in Egypt," written by Joel Beinin. His photos are included in Paris Photo in the Sfeir-Semler gallery space along with Wael Shawky and Akram Zaatari (who I have also written about on this blog, here).

Many of Alwan's photos are portraits that show people as individuals in the context of their work or in the public sphere. Details of the street, workshop, tools of their trade, and clothing give the viewer clues to the texture of their lives. Although these portrayals convey a sense of dignity as well as compassion for the hardships of working class Egyptians, the photos do not devolve into abstract statements about the "human condition," a problem -- to my mind -- with some documentary photography. 

The people in Alwan's photographs are always being themselves, even if caught in a particularly self-possessed, carefully composed moment. This is not "decisive moment" photography like that of Henri Cartier-Bresson or poetic street photographers like Robert Frank, both of whom preferred the candid and thus seemingly revealing gesture or expression. Alwan allows his subjects the privilege of projecting their image of themselves to the camera knowingly and with confidence. People in the Middle East, especially the working class, have historically not often been allowed that kind of agency or control over their own appearance. This doesn't mean that the resulting photos are somehow less true or meaningful. As in all photography, the fraction of a second exposure can only convey that momentary slice of time. Things look different in the next instant. But in this brief moment of speaking to the camera Alwan's subjects tell us something about their resilience and uniqueness with complex expressions of defiance, curiosity, humor, patience or sadness. 

I urge you to look at Alwan's photos on his website and also to explore Paris Photo, in Paris if possible! I would love to hear comments from anyone who gets a chance to see the exhibitions.

Maha Maamoun and the Pyramids

A friend of mine from the year I spent at the American University in Cairo in 1989-90, Maha Maamoun, became an artist who uses photography. She is also a curator. We re-met in Beirut in 2007 where she was organizing the Meeting Points 5 arts festival and now I see her work has been in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. There is a statement by her in the most recent issue of Nafas art magazine. Her recent work, Domestic Tourism I and II, is described there, with photos.

For Domestic Tourism II she searched for scenes in movies that featured the pyramids as backdrop and put them together. She explains the chronology and rhythm she chose for the resulting film, which sounds evocative:

"I wanted to start and end with the present so that the film does not end up as a celebration of a romantic past vs. a rough present. Instead, it visits the past and shows its various formulations by a changing present.

The film starts with recent scenes, from the 2000’s, with their lighter and more superficial engagement in social and political issues, then the tone of the film heightens as we move backwards through the 90’s, 80’s, and 70’s, with cinema’s deeper engagement with the harshness of political and social realities. The tension is then released with the celebratory scenes of political and social glee from the 60’s and 50’s, where the pyramids act mostly as a backdrop to a celebrating and celebrated middle class. Here we reach the oldest scene I have, the turning point, after which the tension gradually builds up as we move up again through the traumatic political and economic upheavals of the late 60’s, phasing out to the present."

"Humanising Photography"

The Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies at Durham University in the UK organized a conference called "Humanising Photography" September 25 - 27, 2009. At some point I think they will be uploading audio recordings of all our presentations if you'd like to listen.

On the way there, as I looked over a newspaper full of daily news photography I wondered what photojournalism would look like if we turned our attention away from individuals and their immediate responses (away from the emphasis on capturing gestures and expressions) and instead focused on political and social processes and power relations. In the 1930s it was the new technology of 35mm cameras, such as the Leica, that enabled photographers to get up close, to photograph without being seen, without flash, to capture candid shots of people. The philosophy of humanism also emphasized the importance of the individual. It is hard to imagine photojournalism any differently, but I think the convention of focusing on individuals suits the staging and arranging of events for the camera that occupy a lot of a daily news photographer's time and also creates a certain narrow view on the world that blocks understanding of the deeper political forces at work. Prodding my thoughts was David Campbell's interesting essay "Constructed Visibility: Photographing the Catastrophe of Gaza."

I don't have an answer, but I think it's worthwhile to imagine a new style of photojournalism. Photos of individuals will always be important, especially for inspiring people to care about the costs of various politics and policies. But I'm interested in what role photographs can play in illuminating causes not just the consequences. (Campbell shows, for example, how the photography of the war on Gaza in January 2009 problematically created Gazans as simply potential recipients of humanitarian aid and was not able to show how Gaza is a place in permanent catastrophe, not just periodic breakdown.)

I presented a paper at the conference that describes a major style within photojournalism. Perhaps it is useful to analyze older, dominant styles, and to think about how they have become entrenched, in order to imagine new ways of depicting the world.

In my presentation I argued that there is a particular visual style that has been distilled and promoted by the famous agency Magnum Photos (not necessarily invented by it) especially from its founding in 1947 into the 1970s. Using high drama, abstract narrativity, artistic expression and documentary realism, the style creates coherent, orderly compositions that seek to comment on the "human condition" in an abstract, general way. They do this by emphasizing expressions, gestures and action which add up to a story that implies something important about human society is being revealed by the photographer. I think this style has deeply influenced what we consider to be exemplary photojournalism and so is now mainstream. (There is also a newer mode within Magnum, which emphasizes fragmentation and disorder and is more explicitly "arty.")

Here are some examples. Remember, I'm trying to describe the style of a group, not of these individuals.

[Robert Capa]

[Jean Gaumy]

[Raymond Depardon]

[Philip Jones-Griffiths]

After describing the historical circumstances of its development and the style itself I discussed what I think are the implications for this way of depicting the world. To be very brief, I suggest that it creates images that make broad statements about the human condition that ultimately obscure more than they reveal about politics or society. These abstract narratives flatten the world into banal truisms (such as statements about the horrors of war or the tragedy of poverty), limit diversity and pluralism in representations and gloss over the specifics of how politics or society operate. This style of depiction is the product of a certain moment in time, adapted to the needs of a particular (European) institution and molded by specific social forces.

Though it needs more study, I also suggest that this style of photojournalism participated in presenting the developing world as a region in need of development and humanitarian intervention (by Western industrialized countries) in the early post-WWII era, without taking into consideration the complex wishes or needs of the targeted population.

All in all, although the photos produced in this style are stunning and incredibly well crafted, I think this style is not well suited to the way we live now. We need new visual modes that correspond to how we experience the world as increasingly complex, multi-dimensional, and interconnected.

At the conference there were roughly three groups of people presenting work -- photographers, NGO workers who use photography as a tool, and academics. As primarily a photo editor/critic I suppose I overlapped the categories. The photographers were interested in how their photographs might influence people or express their own experiences, the NGO people were concerned with how photography can be used to empower marginalized groups (and they self-reflexively interrogated some of the issues that arise when Western groups attempt to effect change in the developing world), while the academics were generally addressing the question of what work photographs do (for example, how they are able - or not - to testify to human suffering, how they "bear witness," how they are used and reused for national or political purposes, what they reveal when examined decades after being taken and how their meanings shift over time and through different contexts of use).

A thread that kept emerging was the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics (most explicitly discussed by Mark Reinhardt). The notion of affect surfaced a number of times. Mark (a political theorist) asked what particular aesthetic strategies induce what effects, what emotions. He noted that the problem with provoking sentimentality is that makes feeling primary and political structures secondary or invisible.

Eugenie Shinkle discussed certain examples of landscape photography that appears more and more in the context of humanitarian photography because it addresses the human costs of conflict and environmental degradation through the marks and scars on the landscape, not by depicting individuals. (I think this type of photography may be one way forward in crafting new styles of photojournalism -- think of Simon Norfolk, Sophie Ristelhueber, Edward Burtynsky.) Here are some examples, both of Israeli road blocks in the West Bank:

[Simon Norfolk]

[Sophie Ristelhueber]

Eugenie made the point that the aesthetic overlays the cognitive and the affective (brings together thought and feeling is how I understand that). So, she asks, what kind of affect is being created in these landscape photos through their particular aesthetic and what kind of political response do they provoke? She suggested empathy, a shared sense of belonging, and a linkage between the global and local. It was unclear what exactly about the photos created these responses. That is why, I would argue, it is important to look at the formal elements of photography (composition, design, use of light, form, framing, etc) in addition to political, social and historical context.

There is much more I could write about the ideas brought up at the conference, and clarifications I could make in my argument about a Magnum visual style, but this post has gone on too long already!

Beginning again, and art from the Middle East

I was inspired by discussions with David Campbell (Photography, Multimedia, Politics), Jim Johnson (Notes on Politics, Theory and Photography), and Mark Reinhardt (editor of the book Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain) to begin this blog again. We were on a roundtable together, along with Victoria Hattam, at the American Political Science Association conference in Toronto last week about the fear of images in political science and the broad topic of politics and photography.

So, I hereby rededicate myself to posting about photography and the Middle East, including some of my own photographs once in a while. Please keep in mind though that this will still be a "slow blog." These will be occasional posts.

-----

In the Nafas Art Magazine there is an interesting article by Nada Shabout, Are Images Global?, about interpreting art from the Middle East. She talks about how interpretation, critical writing and curating art from the region is being done for the most part outside the region, primarily in Europe and the US. She makes the useful point that a consequence of this trend is the lack of understanding of the art's historical context and development and goes on to say:

"There is little scholarship about modern art but, instead, an ever-growing number of exhibition catalogues arising from the increasing number of contemporary shows of Middle East art. The move from a period of invisibility through to one of celebration of everything related to the Middle East has fostered a sense of discontinuity, with contemporary production being seen as a new, detached phenomenon."

In my own writing about photography I am very interested in and concerned with historicizing -- putting photographs in the context of the period they emerged from in order to explore how and why they look the way they do. To understand visual images we have to investigate the myriad forces that acted upon them as they were made, such as markets, intellectual trends, politics, technological changes, the photographer's working conditions, etc.

She ends her article just when it gets most interesting:

"Finally, I would note that this displacement of centres of knowledge production has affected the development of art education and art history within the region. ... Nevertheless, some ambitious institutional initiatives around the Arab world, as well as new research and critical thinking by an increasing number of younger scholars, signal possible fresh directions for the field’s future advancement."

I have also noticed that contemporary institutions and practices throughout the region are creating a new creative economy, much of it transnational in nature. There is an overlapping network developing of artists, non-profit cultural groups, publications, galleries, cinema spaces, art buyers, educational programs, festivals, bloggers, curators, exhibits and funding. But I'm not aware of the new research and critical thinking she mentions because my Arabic is not good. I hope some will appear in translation.

Addendum added later:

I just saw that the latest Middle East Studies Association Bulletin (Summer/Winter 2008, though it just came out) has a special section called "Art Without History," introduced by Nada Shabout and with 6 other interesting essays on the topic. It's not online, but you might find it in a university library.

Ongoing series of photos taken in the alleyways in Evergreen, Baltimore

 

Photojournalists, LIFE magazine, and AUB in the 1950s

Yesterday I wrote about an interesting BBC video that shows news photographers at work covering the evacuation of Israeli settlers from a house in the West Bank city of Hebron for The Compelling Image blog. (Read it here.) TCI offers lots of great online classes for photographers of all levels. I teach a course called Developing a Photographer's Eye.

I have also been exploring the new Google archive of LIFE magazine photographs. It's a great resource for scholars and lots of fun for everyone, I recommend taking a look. If you want to license the use of a photo for publication you need to go through Getty. But the Google site has fairly high-res images (ones here are the smaller versions) and can even order prints.

I did a search for American University of Beirut and came up with these shots from 1953. (This is just a sample of ones I like.)

These are all by Lisa Larsen.

Listening to another student Mona Asfour (L), of Palestine and Su'ad Habri (R), preparing to be teachers sit in education class.

 

New Engineering School Building.

Studying on the library roof.

Students.

Sex education class.
[I wonder if this is still taught ... and what exactly was being taught at this time!]

alternatives to disaster photographs

Wandering around the web this morning I spent some time reading a call for papers for a conference at Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies called "Humanising Photography". (Proposals by photographers, scholars and humanitarian workers due Dec 19th.) The associate director of the center (at Durham University in the UK) is the geographer David Campbell, who has written quite a bit on the representation of war, famine and disaster. Two projects he was involved in are on the web: Imaging Famine and The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS.

While I appreciate analysis of images of famine and disaster and how they shape the way the public understands the world (Africa in these cases), I am usually more interested in exploring the alternatives to these depictions. It seems to me that contemporary photojournalism is gradually expanding its visual language to incorporate new visions and ways of seeing that go beyond the simplistic, decontextualized, isolated close up image of an emaciated or suffering individual. (See some of the newer members of Magnum Photos like Jonas Bendiksen for example.) However, the most interesting photographs for complicating our perceptions of a place or a people or a situation seem to be those embraced by the art world.

In that spirit, here are a few artists I stumbled across this morning who create representations of places that go beyond the stereotypes and cliches of the mainstream media.

The curator/photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi addresses this issue directly in a short, interesting interview about the Bamako 2007 photography biennial (in Mali). He put together a smaller exhibit of photography, "Spot On: Bamako 2007," from the biennial at the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) in Berlin. (If you're in Berlin the exhibit is on now until January 11, 2009.)

Check out work by artists from all over Africa (including North Africa and Egypt) by going to the Berlin exhibit website.

Here's a taste.

Sammy Baloji

Baloji makes collages of colonial era photographs incorporated into present-day landscapes. As the exhibit explains: "...in order to understand the present, he reads the traces of the past. He finds such traces and signs in the architecture of Congo’s state mining company. Once the Gécamines stood for the richness of the Belgian colony and the extraction of copper and cobalt was the backbone of the Congoles economy. Under Mobuto’s regime, however, this sector of industry was run down because of the lack of investments and the dictator claimed the profits."

Mouna Karray

"The industrial and harbour city of Sfax, Tunisia, is the home town of the artist Mouna Karray. Since four decades, a series of political decisions has led to the point that public places in Sfax have gradually become non-accessible areas without any function. The remains of these places, redefining the image of the urban landscape, are shown by Mouna Karray in her series Murmurer."

Another artist I found this morning is Ahmed Mater Al-Ziad Aseeri, from Saudi Arabia. He is also a doctor and has incorporated x-rays into his work.

Mixed media on paper, 152 x 102 cm

He explains: "It is designed to be like the opening pages to a religious text. But much larger. Originally the craftsmen would always spend a great deal of time on these pages. They’re the first thing you see. Instead of a traditional geometry I have printed two facing X-ray images of human torsos. I prepared the paper using tea, pomegranate, coffee and other materials traditionally used on these pages. By using them you ensure that when you come to paint onto the paper it will have an extraordinary luminous quality – the paint will truly shine. And that’s what I want to do with this piece, to illuminate. I am giving light. It’s about two humans in conversation. Us and Them. Dar a luz. So many religions around the world share this concept of giving light, not darkness. It is one religious idea that has reached mankind through many different windows."