She Who Tells a Story

In the heart of Washington, DC, in 2016, amid one of the most tumultuous presidential election campaigns in history, the National Museum of Women in the Arts displayed the work of twelve photographers—all women, all born or raised in the Middle East. The exhibit’s title, She Who Tells a Story, is the translation from the Arabic, Rawiya, also the name of the collective of Middle East women photographers founded in 2009. Comprising more than eighty works from the 1990s to the present, the exhibition had originated in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where it was curated by Kristen Gresh. According to Gresh’s (2013, 35) essay in the accompanying catalog, the show “is an invitation to discover new photography, to shift our perspective, and to open a cultural dialogue that is not centered on...