I made these images during the four months I lived in Jordan, working with a toy camera and super expired film that I rolled by hand and developed in my (very gracious and understanding) host family’s bathroom.
These images are disOrientations, meant to question the sense of authoritative “knowledge” about Arab peoples and spaces that arises from ostensibly truthful forms of knowledge production like photography. Split Vision is not so much as a counter-narrative to those representations as a way of calling attention to how trying to render places intelligible, especially through photography, is more a process of hybridity and co-creation than discovery.
I invite you to step into this liminal space without trying to make sense of it.
Annabelle Marcovici is a photographer and senior politics major at Whitman College, a tiny liberal arts college in Eastern Washington. Throughout her life she has also lived in Colorado, Minnesota, Northern California, and Jordan. Constantly uprooting and relocating, she has had to perpetually renegotiate the concept of “home” and is fascinated by the ephemeral, affective relationships between people and places.
