Most Wanted (Art Fund Collection of Middle Eastern Photography)

This photograph forms part of the Art Fund Collection of Middle Eastern Photography. This is an Art Fund initiative for the British Museum and V&A and the broad aim is to create a world-class capsule collection of major names and emerging talents in photography from the Middle East (whether living in the region or in diaspora), from 1900 to today. The Art Fund has given the two museums grants over £150,000 for the collection and additional support for the tour of the collection. The Iranian-American artist Hemami has been strongly influenced by both Persian culture and the politics of exile. This work comes from a series of works entitled Most Wanted based on images circulated over the Internet in 2002 by the US government, showing the faces of people considered as terror suspects. These faces were produced in very low resolution format reducing them to ‘a collection of universal characteristics: beards, veils, dark skinÂ’. She describes this series as follows: ‘Most Wanted investigates the nature of perception, recognition and representation while examining the construction of the image of the new enemy. Interpretations of a series of faceless portrayals of the most wanted terrorists contemplate the ways in which stereotypical perceptions of people are created while pondering the relationship between image and identityÂ’.