Exhibit of the week: She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers From Iran and the Arab World

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Through Jan. 12

The 12 Middle Eastern photographers featured in this unprecedented exhibition subvert viewers’ expectations from the start, said Alicia Blaisdell-Bannon in the Cape Cod, Mass., Times. The first image we see is “an eye-catcher”—a large triptych that recalls a 19th-century portrait of a harem girl. This young woman lies supine on elaborately patterned cushions, “her long, black hair flowing to the floor” and her gaze steady. But step closer and you’ll discover that the jewelry draping her body and the intricate patterning of the background were all fashioned from gold and silver bullet casings. Created by Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi, Bullets Revisited #3 announces that no generalized assumption about women in the Middle East will go unchallenged in the galleries beyond—especially when one learns that the image and its foreboding air were Essaydi’s response to the Arab Spring uprisings and the grand hopes they raised.

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It turns out that most of the best photography coming out of today’s Middle East is the work of women, said Kerri MacDonald in NYTimes.com. But other than highlighting that reality, this exhibition “doesn’t tell one story; it tells many.” Rania Matar’s series “A Girl and Her Room” roams the region—and the world beyond—to capture the commonalities and differences in the ways that teenage girls present themselves. A series by Newsha Tavakolian shows six female Iranian singers in midsong, the silence of each image underscoring the fact that these women are barred from performing. In another room, a viewer stands between two large group portraits of photographer Jananne Al-Ani with her mother and three sisters, all five women seated in a row and staring right through us, said Chris Bergeron in the Framingham, Mass., MetroWest Daily News. In one of the photos, the women’s faces become increasingly veiled as our eyes travel from right to left, but the relative exposure of each woman’s knees runs counter to any pattern. “Is Al-Ani challenging Islamic conventions of female modesty, spoofing Orientialist depictions of exotic women, or forcing visitors to confront their own prejudices?”

The unexpected juxtapositions keep coming, said Mark Feeney in The Boston Globe. In still lifes by the Iranian photographer Shadi Ghadirian, a hand grenade appears in a bowl of fruit and a soldier’s helmet hangs beside a woman’s scarf. In the series “Women of Gaza,” Tanya Habjouqa presents tableaux she happened upon in the real world—including a small group of women picnicking on a bleak beach behind a small rusty hatchback. “Once again there is incongruous juxtaposition, though the staging comes courtesy not of any photographer but politicians and soldiers.”