Not too long ago, I embarked on a challenging journey to capture a self-portrait, a project that quickly became more difficult than anticipated. Turning the lens towards myself raised numerous unanswered questions. Ultimately, the outcome was disappointingly elusive. Among life's challenges, none seemed as pressing as deciding how to photograph myself. During that time, my uncertainty overshadowed all else.

As I probed the overwhelming complexities of self-identity, I found myself contemplating the difficulties of connecting with our physical selves. The weight of labels—Arab, North African, Muslim, woman, a woman of colour, binary—loomed large, transforming the process into what felt like an enormous amount of emotional labour. This experiment led me to reflect on the journeys of other Arab women who navigated this terrain more successfully, producing self-portraits that eloquently spoke of their unique experiences.

When I spoke to the Jordanian photographer and founder of Darkroom Amman Lina Khaled, we discussed her self-portrait documentary project Zaghloul el Hamam. She started working on it during the lockdown in early 2020. She told me that initially, she felt intimidated.

“I don’t know why. Maybe because there were many people who were doing self-portraits, and I didn’t feel I was the type who just wanted to take pictures of themselves. I just viewed it as a narcissistic practice. I also felt more interested in shooting other people. And then I understood the concept later. It’s deeper than just the desire to see or to duplicate yourself,” she said.

This was during her chemotherapy. It all began with pains in her back, but she couldn’t tell where exactly that pain was coming from. The treatment had confined her to the house, with little interaction with others. Pushed by the fear of not being able to shoot again, capturing self-portraits was one of the limited options that she had.

“It was a way to distract myself and to shoot film to remind myself that I am a photographer. This really helped me get through the process. I used those self-portraits to document the pain. The pain started in my bones. The shape of my hand changed and the pain that I felt also changed,” she said.

For Lina, it all began in a secluded room where she turned her analogue camera into a mirror, giving birth to the timeless and profound art of self-portraiture. Here, the captivating dialogue between the pain she experienced, and the changing shape of her hand unfolds within the images. In this profound solitude, her self-portraits emerge as a testament to the transformative power of self-expression in the face of adversity, showcasing a very personal form of struggle as well as endurance.

Transitioning from Lina's solitary journey to a broader exploration of self-portraiture, it becomes evident that she is not alone in feeling intimidated by the experience at first. The intimate space where Lina transformed her camera onto herself, capturing the pain and isolation of that period in her life, serves as a precursor to understanding the shared sentiments expressed by other women artists in the region. 

Among them, photographer Mashael Al Saie reveals a parallel apprehension as she starts her own project of taking a self-portrait. Their narratives intersect, highlighting a collective thread of vulnerability and courage. This intersection demonstrates the widespread resonance of self-expression among Arab women artists as they navigate the struggle for self-representation

“It was my first time being on the other side of the camera. It was very intimidating, but I felt that it was important for me to do this project,” Mashael said, recounting how the idea occurred to her after she returned from a long trip to her family home in Bahrain. 

“I felt that I had to confront a lot of things about my relationship with my family and my relationship with the whole society in general. I always clashed with the idea of patriarchy. And I am the eldest of three daughters. So, in some ways, I do feel like my father’s son. In this self-portrait, I was trying to pose as my father. It’s a form of dialogue but at the same time, it’s also a form of sympathy or even performance. This portrait includes all of his belongings, the briefcase that he’s been using for like 30 years, his jacket, shirt, and glasses,” she said.

Like Mashael and Lina, the Cairo-born photographer and filmmaker Marina Kalleny also had her own fears when she first started trying to capture her self-portrait in 2017. A fresh university graduate at the time, she was looking for ways to experiment with the different ways with which she could speak about her body as a woman who was born and raised in Egypt. 

“Somehow the hardest thing about a self-portrait is to see your face, your eyes, your tense lips, or how you gained some weight. In this photo I decided to hide my face with a tangled mask,” she said. 

According to her, if asked whether this photograph is a genuine reflection of herself, she would certainly say yes, “because I consider this photograph to be the perfect image that I constructed of myself. But what I still want to achieve is to take a similar photo but naked and with my face looking at the camera and to just watch this woman generated in the photograph.”

Transitioning from these introspective journeys, the Egyptian artist Hagar El Sayed's approach shifts the focus from the weighty confrontations of identity and patriarchy to a more spontaneous documentation of moments. For Hagar, self-portraiture becomes a channel for letting go and allowing ideas to flow naturally. In this contrast, we witness the different reasons that drive artists in their exploration of self-representation, from the nuanced dialogues of identity to the liberated embrace of the present moment.

Hagar started painting self-portraits during her studies at Helwan University’s Faculty of Fine Art in 2022. Coming from a painting background, she loves exploring different media like monotypes, sculptures, illustrations, installations, and ceramics in her work. She tries to mix these diverse media to recreate what inspires her the most, like video games, stories from the streets, advertisements, and social media. 

“I had no fear of confronting myself. On the contrary, I felt that I simply wanted to record my feelings during this stage. It was just me sitting in front of the mirror with myself, recording how I felt. At the university, we were studying about the different types of arts and styles but all I knew at the time was my feelings, which I wanted to record. We can say that it was a mere recording of my memories,” she said.

When she started working on her self-portrait, she did not care about perfecting the details, like the shapes, light, or contrast. “I just wanted to let go, just like I am talking to you right now. Once I start, the ideas flow.”

Reflecting on discussions with Hagar and the other artists evoked memories of my own challenges during my experience with trying to take a self-portrait. All of these experiences, including my failed attempt, emphasize the profound importance of women's self-portraiture, delving into the depths of our inner worlds and serving as a reflection of our personal struggles as Arab women. Much like in the past, contemporary artists turn to this accessible form of expression as a means to counter exclusion from certain spaces. Conversely, while engaging in such projects offers an escape from external judgments, it also opens Pandora's box of our inner demons, which are even harder to escape.