During her travels in Iran, the photographer Miriam Stanke met the Iranian poet, Heydar Abbasi, also known by his pen name Barişmaz. Here he is in his house near Tabriz.
Photo: Miriam Stanke
The rooms are not exactly lavish, but they have in common a few details that make them look inviting and a little bit theatrical: layered rugs, yards of jewel-toned drapery, fringed lampshades, gilded picture frames tilting off the walls. It’s a domestic design language that the curator Romaisa Baddar grew up with, even as her Moroccan mother and Egyptian father raised her in Amsterdam, and it’s one she notices in homes all over the Middle East. But the aesthetic is “often dismissed as ‘kitsch,’” she says, and it’s also increasingly threatened by contemporary ideas of luxury and (monochromatic, pale, minimalist) good taste. This slide toward cultural homogenization is partly what motivated her to produce Living Rooms, a new book of photography published by Middle East Archive, the platform she founded in 2020. Through the work of 41 photographers and a mix of archival and contemporary imagery, the book documents the living room in all its variations across the region, from Istanbul to Iran and even as far as Berlin, where a Turkish diasporic community maintains its heritage and traditions.
Most of the photos present quiet scenes of daily life, like a man in Aleppo, Syria, bending down to pray or a mother braiding her son’s hair, a moment captured by photographer Ali Al Shehabi in Bahrain. Others reveal glimpses of living rooms in their more public function, as spaces of hospitality and celebration, with guests dancing in the middle of a crowd or clustered around a spread of flatbread and greens. Some of the most striking images bridge the living room’s public and private functions via still lifes of mementos carefully arranged for display and appliances wrapped in floral plastic slipcovers. As Sara Bokr, a Palestinian architect, and editor Dalia Al-Dujaili write in an essay in the book, “Our plastic-covered sofas are evidence of our culture of preservation, our knack for making something to last but also our determination to impress our guests.” But, for the most part, the book doesn’t provide much in the way of textual explanation, and instead forces a close read of the images themselves.
What’s less evident in the book, and intentionally so, are the signs of conflict that tend to dominate visual representations of the region. Challenging that expectation led Baddar to establish Middle East Archive in the first place; as she researched contemporary photographers working there, she found vast amounts of imagery that went beyond the visual tropes of ruin. It’s not that Living Rooms ignores this reality completely, but that it chooses instead to highlight the limbo of waiting out a curfew or the private release of laughing among friends.
From As I Lay Between Two Seas. Bahrain, 2021.
Photo: Ali Al Shehabi
Photo: Mariam El Gendy
While following a nomadic tribe in the Zagros mountains in Iran, photographer Miriam Stanke took this photo of a living room wall carefully decorated with family portraits in the home of a semi-nomadic family.
Photo: Miriam Stanke
During several curfews imposed on many cities in eastern Turkey, Stanke caught some scenes within family homes behind the barricades. A man is sitting in his living room during a harsh winter month in Yüksekova.
Photo: Miriam Stanke
Jenin Silat al-Harithiya, Palestine, 2024.
Photo: Sakir Khader
Photo: Rena Effendi
Photo: Ségolène Ragu
Photographer Olgaç Bozalp set out to photograph the Turkish community in Germany, which has been settled there since the 1960s and now numbers over 3.5 million. In many Turkish families, the TV remote symbolizes power — something his father always held and kept in pristine condition. Seeing this remote in a Turkish home in Berlin instantly reminded him of his own childhood (2016).
Photo: Olgaç Bozalp
Photo: Shayan Sajadian
In eastern Turkey, a mother and son relax in the living room of their house in Yüksekova during an evening curfew.
Photo: Miriam Stanke
A used living room set for sale at Arcenciel in Damour, Lebanon. The photo was taken a year after the October 2019 wildfire had burned much of the building. The staff continued to use the space, and people shopped for furniture despite the damage.
Photo: Rita Kabalan
Photo: Rena Effendi
Photo: Sabiha Çimen
Photo: Shayan Sajadian
Photo: Sabiha Çimen