Reading Marie Al-Khazen's Photographs by Yasmine Nachabe Taan;

Author:Yasmine Nachabe Taan; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350111585
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2020-10-04T21:00:00+00:00

Layers of social, colonial, and gendered connotations

It was within this climate of vibrant women’s activities that al-Khazen produced images such as Two women dressed like men (Figure 1). The photograph is not merely a representation of two sisters smoking cigarettes in their salon, but rather a photograph fraught with symbols through which social, colonial, and gendered connotations are addressed. The photograph can be understood as an opportunity for al-Khazen to alter her image and the image of women within the changing landscape of gender and social politics of Mandate Lebanon. Lucy Lippard explores the appeal of overtly theatrical photographs as “spatial dislocation into a magical elsewhere.”72 How can a photograph transport a person out of their social reality into another one? Lippard rehearses the different strategies that can be enacted through the use of backdrop paintings in photographs. Backdrops are often idealized landscapes, emphasizing beauty, elegance, exoticism, and fantasy. The two subjects dressed up in European attire against the Oriental setting create an anachronistic effect; they appear as if they were copied and pasted from a different era into an ancient, traditional, Arab/Lebanese setting. I argue that this visual tension in Marie al-Khazen’s photograph, through her masculine and colonial accoutrements, offers the opportunity for an altered self-image. At the encounter with the lens, the subjects are transformed, and their persona is materialized on the surface of the paper as the people they aspire to be: modern Arab women.

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