Absent Portrait
In certain countries in the middle east, images of women on packaging are forbidden.
To make this project, i sourced original, censored packaging from Iran. I then removed the packaging in photoshop, leaving just the censored image of the woman.
What remains is a portrait. A portrait not of a person, but of the absence of a person. A religious point of view. A government. A cultural perspective, from a particular time and place in history.
This is not a project about the Middle East, and how it sees (or doesn’t see) women, although of course, that’s a large part of it. It’s about how politics and religion reconfigure reality in every culture. Some use marker pens, others use Fox news. It’s up to us to choose to see it or not.
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