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Archive of Love? Empowerment, Exoticization, and Photographic Representation in Yumna Al-Arashi’s Aisha

Aharonian Niziblian, Varanta LU (2026) MKVM13 20261
Media and Communication Studies
Department of Communication and Media
Abstract
This thesis examines how Yumna Al-Arashi’s Aisha negotiates the tension between the potential for empowerment and the risk of exoticization in its photographic representation of tattooed women. Aisha is a photobook and artist’s book that combines portraits, landscapes, archival family photographs, and written fragments. It begins from the absence of Al-Arashi’s greatgrandmother’s facial tattoo in the family archive, an absence that becomes the starting point for a wider photographic project about older tattooed women from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The study asks how Aisha creates visibility for tattooed women while also working within a visual history where women from the SWANA region have often been represented through signs of... (More)
This thesis examines how Yumna Al-Arashi’s Aisha negotiates the tension between the potential for empowerment and the risk of exoticization in its photographic representation of tattooed women. Aisha is a photobook and artist’s book that combines portraits, landscapes, archival family photographs, and written fragments. It begins from the absence of Al-Arashi’s greatgrandmother’s facial tattoo in the family archive, an absence that becomes the starting point for a wider photographic project about older tattooed women from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The study asks how Aisha creates visibility for tattooed women while also working within a visual history where women from the SWANA region have often been represented through signs of cultural difference. The thesis uses qualitative multimodal visual analysis, drawing on social semiotics and visual methodology. The material includes the full photobook, with closer attention to 153 portrait images and selected written fragments. The portraits were coded through
categories such as framing, gaze, posture, gesture, setting, tattoo visibility, and relation to surrounding pages. These coding patterns were then interpreted in relation to empowerment, exoticization, opacity, archive, and photobook form.
The analysis shows that Aisha creates the potential for empowerment by giving older tattooed women sustained visual and archival presence. This presence is built through portraiture, repetition, written fragments, and the movement between images across the book. At the same time, the thesis argues that this visibility also carries a risk. Because the tattoos appear on faces and hands, they can become the detail through which the women are read as culturally distinct. Aisha does not remove this risk. Instead, it limits it by varying how tattoos are shown, placing portraits within wider sequences, and using written fragments that refuse to fully define tattoo meanings.
The main finding is that Aisha holds empowerment and exoticization in tension through its photobook form. The thesis contributes to media and communication studies by showing
that representation is shaped not only by individual photographs, but also by sequence,
repetition, written fragments, and the movement from page to page. This matters because
the photobook form can create meaning gradually, through the relation between images,
text, and material structure. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Aharonian Niziblian, Varanta LU
supervisor
organization
course
MKVM13 20261
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
keywords
Yumna Al-Arahi, Aisha, photobook, visual representation, SWANA women, tattoos, empowerment, exoticization, archive, multimodal visual analysis
language
English
id
9229200
date added to LUP
2026-06-17 11:19:06
date last changed
2026-06-17 11:19:06
@misc{9229200,
  abstract     = {{This thesis examines how Yumna Al-Arashi’s Aisha negotiates the tension between the potential for empowerment and the risk of exoticization in its photographic representation of tattooed women. Aisha is a photobook and artist’s book that combines portraits, landscapes, archival family photographs, and written fragments. It begins from the absence of Al-Arashi’s greatgrandmother’s facial tattoo in the family archive, an absence that becomes the starting point for a wider photographic project about older tattooed women from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The study asks how Aisha creates visibility for tattooed women while also working within a visual history where women from the SWANA region have often been represented through signs of cultural difference. The thesis uses qualitative multimodal visual analysis, drawing on social semiotics and visual methodology. The material includes the full photobook, with closer attention to 153 portrait images and selected written fragments. The portraits were coded through
categories such as framing, gaze, posture, gesture, setting, tattoo visibility, and relation to surrounding pages. These coding patterns were then interpreted in relation to empowerment, exoticization, opacity, archive, and photobook form.
The analysis shows that Aisha creates the potential for empowerment by giving older tattooed women sustained visual and archival presence. This presence is built through portraiture, repetition, written fragments, and the movement between images across the book. At the same time, the thesis argues that this visibility also carries a risk. Because the tattoos appear on faces and hands, they can become the detail through which the women are read as culturally distinct. Aisha does not remove this risk. Instead, it limits it by varying how tattoos are shown, placing portraits within wider sequences, and using written fragments that refuse to fully define tattoo meanings.
The main finding is that Aisha holds empowerment and exoticization in tension through its photobook form. The thesis contributes to media and communication studies by showing
that representation is shaped not only by individual photographs, but also by sequence,
repetition, written fragments, and the movement from page to page. This matters because
the photobook form can create meaning gradually, through the relation between images,
text, and material structure.}},
  author       = {{Aharonian Niziblian, Varanta}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Archive of Love? Empowerment, Exoticization, and Photographic Representation in Yumna Al-Arashi’s Aisha}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}