Light from the Middle East

Light from the Middle East explores the various ways that contemporary Middle Eastern artists deploy the language and techniques of photography. Whether embracing the capacity of photography to record or bear witness, or subverting that process in order to highlight its susceptibility to manipulation and recontextualization, they use the medium to tell stories, to question, and to challenge. This book accompanies an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (13 November 20127 April 2013), the first major museum exhibition of contemporary Middle Eastern photography. It presents over 25 artists from across the greater Middle East (including North Africa and Central Asia), whose multiple viewpoints are appropriate to a region where collisions between personal, social, religious and political life can be emotive and complex. It includes a wide array of work made by artists living in the region and in diaspora, ranging from photojournalism to staged and digitally manipulated photographs. Marta Weiss is Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has organised exhibitions at the V&A, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum, and has published articles and catalogue essays on topics ranging from Victorian photocollage to contemporary Iranian photography. She holds a BA in history of art from Harvard University and earned a PhD, specialising in the history of photography, from Princeton University. Venetia Porter is curator of the collection of Islamic and modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art at the British Museum. She studied Arabic and Islamic art at Oxford University and obtained her Ph.D on the medieval history and architecture of the Yemen from the University of Durham. Her publications include Islamic Tiles (1995), Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East (2006), Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets (2011), The Art of Hajj (2012), and (ed.) Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (2012).