Everyday for the last three months, as I make my way to my different classes, I’ve walked past a collection of large, framed photographs that hang in the hallways of New York University Abu Dhabi.  These black and white images of Muslim woman from around the world are part of the French-Algerian photographer Nadia Benchallal’s project entitled “Sisters”. 


Last September, I attended a presentation given by Benchallal about her project. During the hour-long scholarly discussion led by the Shamoon Zamir, NYUAD’s Professor of Literature and Visual Studies, we learnt about Benchallal’s personal journey as a photographer as well as the motives and aims fueling her current project. Meeting the woman behind the camera had an unexpected effect on me: it gave the photographs had a deeper, more personal meaning. Hearing Benchallal talk about her photographs really emphasized the reality that someone – a real person with choices and objectives, with agency - had decided to capture each particular moment a certain way and include it in a collection. 

Nadia Benchallal was born and raised in France but is of Algerian descent. She developed an interest in photography when playing with her older brother’s camera as a child and went on to study photography at ICT in New York. Whilst Benchallal was there as a university student, in 1992, civil war broke out in Algeria. At this point, Benchallal developed a keen interest in her homeland and so set off to discover and document a society in strife.   


Since then, Benchallal has roamed across the Arab world with her camera. From the civil war in Algeria to the aftermath of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia to the tumultuous years in Myanmar, Benchallal has been there to capture the images. France, Palestine, Iran, Burma, Malaysia: each country she has documented is laid out in her photographic essay.   As a woman photographer of Algerian descent, Benchallal is in a unique position to document the day-to-day lives of Muslim women. The connections she can make with these woman and the places she can visit tie in with the techniques she employs to present her topic narrow gap between the viewers of the photographs and the women of the photographs.