Anthony Hamboussi

On the August 12, 1939 cover of The New Yorker, illustrator Perry Barlow presents a curious scene: a man in a white suit and turban stands with a camera, intently photographing an American family dining under yellow umbrellas. The moment is light, almost whimsical, but beneath the surface lies a subtle and subversive twist, a reversal of the colonial gaze.

Traditionally, Western photographers travel to the Global South to document the so-called "exotic" other. The camera is a tool of observation and control, a way to shape narratives and cultural perceptions. In Barlow's image, however, the brown-skinned tourist takes on the role of observer. The white American family becomes the spectacle.

As an Egyptian-American photographer living and working in the United States, I cannot look at this image without feeling its friction and its resonance. I carry the burden of being both a subject of the historic Western gaze and now, paradoxically, an outsider with a camera in the heart of the empire. This position, both empowered and precarious, shapes how I navigate the act of making images.

In Egypt, photographing strangers can be seen as a violation of a shared social fabric, not just a question of legality. The act of taking a photo is intertwined with questions of consent, visibility, and care. In contrast, in many Western contexts, photography is framed around freedom and artistic autonomy, a logic that often erases the power dynamics embedded in seeing.

So when I raise my camera in an American park or sidewalk, I am not simply making an image, I am engaging in a social and political act. I become hyper-visible. My presence with a camera disrupts the assumed neutrality of the white gaze. I am not just observing; I am witnessing and reframing. And often, I am met with discomfort or suspicion, not because of what I am doing, but because of who I am while doing it.

I find myself in a battle not just for representation, but for the right to see.

The New Yorker cover is more than a charming summertime illustration. It is an accidental prophecy. In that image, the turbaned man asserts his right to look back. He does what generations of Western travelers have done without question. He inverts the colonial hierarchy, gently, almost humorously, but undeniably.

In my own work, I aim to carry that inversion forward. I photograph American life with the same curiosity and complexity with which others have captured my Fatherland. But I do so with a consciousness of history and of responsibility. I do not seek to objectify or flatten. I seek to witness, to complicate, to insist on reciprocity.

As Edward Said wrote in Orientalism, "The Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. It was (and is) a thing to be known, a thing to be possessed." To photograph as a brown man in the West is to reject that imposed passivity, to move from being a thing to being a thinker, an observer, a narrator.

This idea echoes John Berger’s insight in Ways of Seeing, where he reminds us that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.” Looking is never neutral; it always comes with history, power, and assumptions. Every image is shaped by context, by legacy, by where we stand and who we are allowed to be while seeing.

The violence of representation becomes painfully clear when we recall the images that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison. When I first saw those photographs—images of Arab men stripped, hooded, chained, sexualized, and mocked—I was stunned not only by the brutality but by the casualness with which they were taken. The soldiers posed with their captives as if they were trophies, smiling at the camera. Photography here was not just evidence of abuse; it was the medium of dehumanization. It revealed how deeply the Arab man had been cast as less than human—an object of ridicule, a body without dignity. These photographs were not exceptions; they were the grotesque result of a system that conditions one to see the other as animal, as disposable, as spectacle.

We are seeing this again in the images coming out of Gaza. Bodies torn apart, children buried under rubble, entire families erased—and yet the global response remains tepid, muted, or silent. These images circulate widely, yet they do not compel intervention. The question must be asked: why? Perhaps because the viewer has already been conditioned, through decades of media, policy, and propaganda, not to see Palestinians as fully human. Just as with Abu Ghraib, the spectacle of suffering becomes normalized. The image becomes another tragic thumbnail in a feed, rather than a call to action. The power of photography is present, but so is its impotence in the face of systemic disregard for certain lives.

To photograph as a brown man in the West is to navigate power and perception at every turn. It is to reclaim the frame—not just as a technical boundary, but as a space of authorship, truth-telling, and resistance.

It is to say: I see you, too.

- Anthony Hamboussi, 2025