Edward Said, a literary scholar and public intellectual, spent much of his lifetime ruing the way Westerners represented the Islamic world. “What America refuses to see clearly,” he wrote months before he died in 2003, “it can hardly hope to remedy.” A fascinating exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston brings the region into sharper focus. She Who Tells A Story collects the work of 12 contemporary female photographers and film-makers from the Middle East. At a time when American and European views of the Islamic world tend to be filtered through a lens of fear and anxiety, these images offer a more nuanced portrait of a culturally complicated place.

Read More: Behind the Veil

See also: The Middle East Through Women’s Cameras