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Dot. 30″ x 40″. c-41 print

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Halos. 30″ x 40″. c-41 print

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Airmail. 30″ x 40″. c-41 print

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JOWHARA ALSAUD makes multi-textural images which combine drawing, photo and collage. This body of work began as an exploration of censorship in Saudi Arabia and it’s effects on visual communication: “While there is a lack of consistency from region to region, overall, images are highly scrutinized and controlled. Some superficial examples of this would be skirts lengthened and sleeves crudely added with black markers in magazines or blurred out faces on billboards. I tried to apply the language of the censors to my personal photographs. I began making line drawings, omitting faces and skin. Keeping only the essentials preserved the anonymity of my subjects. This allowed me to circumvent, and comment on, some of the cultural taboos associated with photography. Namely the stigma attached to bringing the “personal portrait”, commonly reserved for the private domestic space, into a public sphere.”

“By etching these drawings back into film and printing them in a traditional darkroom, I’m trying to point out how malleable it is as a medium, even before digital manipulation became so advanced and accessible. With these interventions emerges a highly coded and self-reflexive language. What also interests me is that the information omitted (faces, skin and emulsion) creates an image of its own, as do the censors to our cultural landscape.” by JOWHARA ALSAUD

And good news if you are in New York, you can see some of JOWHARA’s work at the Camera Club of New York in the show entitled “Drawing Pictures,” curated by JOELLE JENSEN (until May 1, 2010).

JOWHARA ALSAUD lives between New York and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.