Photography has been a constant presence that has underpinned my sense of identity throughout my life. Photographs were the important possessions with which my family fled Egypt to France when I was a young child, and they went with us to America. My parents pored over these photographs - I felt the loss of our stability within these traces of our past, and the imperative to remember and capture has driven my photographic practice forward.
I began to make self-portraits that were layered and abstracted to obfuscate my physical presence. The act of concealment was both addressing cultural constructions of identity and a necessary process of self-examination for me. Making Veils began with my own photographic capturing of veils and fabrics – and my concealed self. I used my photographs as the image source, which I manipulated and layered in Photoshop to create highly abstracted “self-portraits”. Veils is the bringing together of my investigations of personal identity, geographic displacement, and cultural memory.
