crayon sur papier
/ pencil on paper
14,5 x 17,5 "
650 $ chaque / each
The history of photography in the Arab world is not well documented. Local photographic production only flourished after Yessai Garabedian, the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, held the first photography workshop in the region in the 1860s. In the years that followed, photographic production continued to expand, especially as Armenian exiles, many of whom had been trained as photographers, fled Turkey for Islamic countries. With the arrival of Kodak box cameras in the 1880s and 1890s, the appetite for photographic images increased.
Over the course of his working life, Tripoli-based Armenian photographer Antranik Anouchian owned what was called Studio Anouchian where he took thousands of passport photos, much of which took place during the years of 1935-1970. Only over the last several years, however, has the Arab Image Foundation, collected and cataloged these and other studio portraits and since then established the largest archive in the world of photographic images from the Middle East and North Africa.
Having said that, the work I produce has always been both reflective of and influenced by the medium of photography. As a result of living in Saudi Arabia, a country that forbid any use of public photographic/video documentation, the only images permissible were that of the passport photo. As a woman, I was only able to leave the city and travel within the country with written permission from my father and the accompaniment of an Iqama or in-country passport. Consequently, the passport photo not only identified me but came to represent the opportunity to exist as a somewhat free individual. Over the course of the last year, I have begun making detailed drawings inspired by passport portraits.
Over the next six months, I will continue to complete 198 drawings (99 men/99 women), replicated from Antranik Anouchian’s passport/portrait photo series. Collectively, these 198 drawings convey pluralistic and dynamic Middle Eastern communities while seeking to embody the tension between the general and the idiosyncratic. The drawings act as an investigation of the notions of the individual against the collective mass while exploring issues of identity and identification in a post-September 11th world. Lastly, the Passport Portrait Drawing Series seeks to raise questions not only about portrait photography in the Middle East, but also portraiture, photography, drawing and visual culture in general.