Middle Eastern Creatives Who Photograph Their Own Families

by Barbara Yakimchuk

Middle Eastern Creatives Who Photograph Their Own Families

22 Jan 2026

Artists can feel connected to their country, to nature, or to the social and political issues they want to highlight. Yet, quite often, their strongest source of inspiration turns out to be something far more intimate: family. Mothers and fathers preserved in old black-and-white albums; children whose every movement once felt worth capturing; siblings who shared those early school-morning memories and argued over a chocolate bar that felt impossible to split.

Of course, this isn't unique to artists — we all document our families in one way or another. But perhaps photographers look at their subjects differently. Perhaps they are able to express love in more nuanced, sometimes unexpected ways. We don't know yet — but we are about to find out, by exploring how Middle Eastern photographers portray their families.

Taysir Batniji

We begin with a heartbreaking story — one that may not feel immediately catchy in terms of photographic composition. But if you look closer, you begin to understand what is really happening in these images.

Taysir is a Palestinian–French multidisciplinary artist who works not only with photography, but also with installation, drawing, video, and sculpture. He has been working in the arts for more than three decades; the real jewel of his practice, however, is the photobook Disruptions, created between 2015 and 2017.

The images in the book aren't photographs in the traditional sense. They are screenshots of WhatsApp video calls made from Paris to his family in Gaza — images that appear blurred, blocked, glitched, and half-erased. The central figure of the work is his mother, around whom his sisters, brothers, and nephews revolve. Taysir says the book is dedicated to her.

Her passing in 2017 brought the series to a close, but the work has since taken on a wider weight, speaking also to the 53 members of his family.

Source: taysirbatniji.com

Amak Mahmoodian

Amak isn't just a photographer but a multidisciplinary artist, for whom photography is only one layer of a larger practice. Each project is layered. Instead of photographing her family directly, she turns to family archives, reshaping existing images to tell more complex stories.

One of her key projects, Shenasnameh, is named after the official Iranian birth certificate. The origin of the work is simple: Amak was sitting in a reception room, holding her own birth certificate alongside her mother’s, waiting to update the photographs. Something clicked in that moment.

It was the tension between love for those closest to her and the frustration she felt towards the restrictions imposed on Iranian women. As Amak explains, “Women were expected to look the same — plain faces beneath identical headscarves.” Yet beyond the photograph in the document, there was another element: the fingerprint. “While the faces had been made uniform, the fingerprints were still different.”

Shenasnameh therefore goes beyond portraying just Amak and her mother. By featuring many women from her family, the project becomes both a tribute and a statement: even when systems attempt to erase individuality and enforce sameness, identity persists. These women may be made to look alike on paper, but they are never the same.

Source: amakmahmoodian.com

Manal AlDowayan

Family is one of the central themes in Manal AlDowayan’s work, though she often approaches it as a social system shaped by identity, duty, and rights. A significant part of her practice focuses on the role of women within families, most clearly seen in her project Esmi – My Name. In this work, she asked Saudi women — who are traditionally expected to avoid having their first names spoken publicly — to write their names, posing a simple yet powerful question: what does it mean to belong to a family if your name can't be spoken?

Yet her most sensitive and tangible project — and the one that connects most closely to our story — moves away from public or social issues. It is dedicated to her father and includes photographs of many members of her extended family. After his passing, Manal began reworking and re-examining his photographs, driven by a deeply personal question: And I, will I forget? This question gave the project its name.

From that fear grew an urge to save images, preserve objects, and fill pages with notes and detailed descriptions. The work lingers on memory and on how remembering becomes a way of staying connected to those we love.

Source: manaldowayan.com

Rania Matar

Rania is a Lebanese photographer based in the United States, and motherhood isn't just a title in her life — it is a foundation of her artistic practice. Much of her work explores family, identity, and cultural belonging, with portraiture always at its core.

One of her most personal bodies of work began almost by accident. The Family Moments series was originally meant to be shot by another photographer, simply as Christmas card images. Instead, it turned into something far more chaotic — and ultimately pushed Rania to take the photographs herself.

Like a true mother, Rania found beauty in that chaos. The project became a way to stay fully present, to notice the small wonders of everyday life that often pass us by, and to learn from those moments rather than control them.

Over time, these photographs have become a living archive. As Rania explains, her children are growing older and are no longer as eager to take part in photo shoots as they once were. The images now stand as records of closeness, time passing, and a family slowly changing.

Source: raniamatar.com

Ali Al Shehabi

Ali is a Bahraini artist whose main focus is telling stories about his home country and the Middle East more broadly — preserving moments of everyday culture and the people within it. Much of his work carries a collective voice. Yet there is one project in his portfolio that is entirely personal: , dedicated to his mother.

His mother was also a photographer, and Ali shares that the project began when he started going through their family archives. He realised that while she had spent years documenting his life and his brother’s, there were very few photographs of herself. Out of that absence, the project slowly took shape. It is a long-term work — one that will continue, as he says, for as long as his mother is alive.

What matters most to Ali is that these photographs aren't staged. They show her simply as she is — working in the garden, choosing the wigs she wears after cancer treatment, cooking in the kitchen. Exactly how he sees her every day: loved and beautiful.

Source: alishehabi.net

Tanya Traboulsi

Tanya is a Lebanese photographer whose work sits at the intersection of documentary, personal archives, and social observation. Beirut is at the centre of her photographs, but it never appears alone. It is always filled with life, and often with her own family.

Her story echoes that of many Lebanese families. Beirut, her beloved city, was one she and her family had to leave in 1983 during the civil war. Thirteen years later, Tanya returned — to reconnect with the city and weave together stories from the past with present-day life into one shared narrative.

This became her project Beirut, Recurring Dream, which brings together images she made over two years of living in the city with photographs from her family archive taken many years earlier. In the photographs, we see her parents hugging, a home filled with kitchen plates and cups as if nothing has changed, and family portraits standing in the same places years apart.

It is a story about memory, family, love — and the pain that lives alongside them.

Source: tanyatraboulsi.com

by Barbara Yakimchuk