Light from the Middle East explores the various ways that contemporary Middle Eastern artists deploy the language and techniques of photography. Whether embracing the capacity of photography to record or bear witness, or subverting that process in order to highlight its susceptibility to manipulation and recontextualization, they use the medium to tell stories, to question, and to challenge.

This book accompanies an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (13 November 2012–7 April 2013), the first major museum exhibition of contemporary Middle Eastern photography. It presents over 25 artists from across the greater Middle East (including North Africa and Central Asia), whose multiple viewpoints are appropriate to a region where collisions between personal, social, religious and political life can be emotive and complex. It includes a wide array of work made by artists living in the region and in diaspora, ranging from photojournalism to staged and digitally manipulated photographs.