ABSTRACT
Photographers Aida Muluneh and Lalla Essaydi share the identity of having been educated in the West, while hailing from families that have deep ties to Africa, Ethiopia and Morocco, respectively. This chapter suggests that it shares a fierce resistance to photographic images and tropes that have enacted discursive violence. Both artists resist the practice in which Western photographers and audiences dominate by looking at and circulating images that debase non-Western women. The idea of iconicity has been appropriated in the age of technological reproduction, with the putatively iconic image circulated as marketing tool. By contrast, the model Muluneh uses for 99 Series is clearly healthy, and the images focus intently on her enigmatically pensive face. The title for Aida Muluneh's exhibit The World is 9 is a quote from the photographer's grandmother that means the world is never perfect and never complete, that is, it is never 10.
