Between Lord Byron’s ecstatic Orientalism, with its colorful harems and whirling dervishes, and the more recent Western views of the Middle East, with their mostly blinkered focus on images of conflict or rapturous oil wealth, the Arab world as seen and decoded by Arab eyes still seems amazingly absent from the Occidental gallery, especially the American one. The upcoming Fotofest photography biennial, which will take place in early 2014 in Houston, will offer Americans a serious opportunity to become familiar with this important and well-established body of work by contemporary Arab photographers.

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