Jowhara AlSaud: Ten/Ten, 2010

“I’ve always been interested in how photography functions, and I try to undermine any documentary authority it may possess as a medium. I’ve always felt that a photograph functions more like a memory, in that it’s a singular perspective of a split second in time, entirely subjective and hence impressionable.”—Jowhara AlSaud

Ten/Ten, by artist Jowhara AlSaud, is from her Out of Line series. This body of work began to explore censorship in Saudi Arabia and its 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 would be skirts lengthened, sleeves crudely added with black markers in magazines, or blurred faces on billboards. When reduced to sketches, the images achieved enough distance from the original photographs that neither subjects nor censors could find them objectionable; by etching these drawings back into film and printing them in a traditional darkroom, AlSaud points 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.

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