Sama Alshaibi, a Tucson, Arizona–based photographer, is a Palestinian-Iraqi who originally came to the United States as a refugee from Iraq. Her mother’s family are also refugees from Jaffa, a historic port city that was fought over and ultimately became part of Israel in 1948. The families that lived there were forced to leave quickly, and many left behind family keepsakes such as family photo albums. Alshaibi’s family have few photographs from their time in Palestine.
Alshaibi became interested in photography at an early age and studied the medium in college. It was at this early age that she began using her body as a subject. Although she did not fully comprehend why, she knew that her body represented something more complex than a figure. In graduate school, just after 9/11, the response to her photographs was filtered through stereotypes of Arab women and conversations often turned to hijabs and burkas. This response prompted successive projects that responded to issues of identity, gender, migration, and war.
