The starting point of Yumna Al-Arashi‘s Aisha is a photographic erasure. The photographer has three portraits of her great-grandmother, Aisha, that were made in Yemen some time between 1950 and 1970. In each one of them (one is reproduced on the book’s cover), there is something missing. Aisha had a facial tattoo that does not show up in any of the three photographs. “There was a straight line running from the middle of her bottom lip to the end of her chin,” Al-Arashi writes.
“The placement of the tattoos carries meaning,” an article about facial tattooing by the Amazigh tribes of Algeria, Kurdish communities in Mesopotamia and the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula informs me, “for example, a vertical line on the chin marks an engagement, whereas a mark at the tip of the nose could symbolise either a marriage or the death of a child.”
It’s easy to see how the arrival of modernity (however you want to define it) would have put an end to the custom. This happened all over the world at many different times, whether it was, for example, early Christians rooting out pagan rituals across Europe (and, later, beyond), societies on the path of what they considered advances putting an end to traditions, or colonizers doing the same with rituals of the societies they took over (such as when traditional tattoos in what became known as Okinawa were banned by the Japanese).
Customs and traditions were lost, many of them forever.
The loss of a custom isn’t quite the same as the loss of the knowledge around it, though. You can preserve knowledge or possibly re-discover it. But it’s not as straightforward to preserve the social and cultural meanings of a custom, let alone to re-discover or revive it. Usually, what has been smashed cannot be put back together again; what has arisen out of centuries of people being with other people cannot be rebuilt.
The photographs in Aisha were taken in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Al-Arashi traveled the lands looking for women with these traditional tattoos. When Al-Arashi found one, she photographed her, but she also listened the the particular stories she encountered, stories about the tattoos and what they meant and/or what function they served (on the back of the book, there is a list of names, but “many of the women preferred their names and family names not to be published.”)
There is, of course, that other aspect: photography. Photography is not an innocent tool when you move with your camera through lands in which different cameras had been used for nefarious ends (colonial or otherwise). Al-Arashi struggles with this aspect of her work. “I’ve been given the language of an oppressor,” she writes, “and the tools of a criminal.”
And yet, she realizes that “find[ing] a way to create beauty with a gun” offers the way out: “you’ll be set free”. A few pages later in the book: “This story is an earnest attempt to recover / to heal / to honor”. And then: “This story which was mine is now yours”.
Photography can serve oppression, but it also can be a tool to do the opposite.
Photographically, one of the most important aspects of the book is that it refuses to operate along the lines of the precious picture (I wrote about how this approach to photography has been bothering me five years ago). There are multiple photographs for the many women Al-Arashi encountered and spoke with, and they’re presented on equal footing one after the other.
Crucially, no attempt at photographic cleverness was employed. If as a viewer who might be used to looking for a favourite (or best) picture you were engage in that endeavour here — picking that favourite or best one — you’d be missing the point. The women are not intended to be viewed as specimen, located by some photographer and then presented to an audience that is far removed.
Instead, as a viewer, you get to spend time with these women (or rather their photographs, but an attempt is made to blur that distinction), and through the photographs you get a glimpse into their worlds. In between, you might see part of their surroundings or you see the land pass by as the photographers is traversing it. Often, it’s not clear where one photograph ends and a different one begins, and that is a nifty device.
Looking through Aisha, I was reminded of Mariela Sancari‘s Moisés, an equally powerful book that employs some of the same strategies. In both cases, what comes across most powerfully is the photographers’ desire to get closer to a person they now have no direct access to any longer. And it is that desire more than anything else that leaves the longest lasting impression on an observer (well, at least on this one, given that your mileage might vary).
This, in the end, is the reason why you want to break with the academy’s convention of the precious picture: because you desperately want to get closer to something that ultimately will remain beyond your reach forever.
Photography might contain the tools of a criminal, and the camera might be a gun.
But photographs — your own or other people’s — can still break your heart in so many different ways.
Highly recommended.
Aisha; photographs and text by Yumna Al-Arashi; 392 pages; Edition Patrick Frey; 2024 (1st edition)/2025 (2nd edition)
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