Photographer Tasneem Alsultan on Walking Away From Western Media

audi photographer Tasneem Alsultan is done looking for validation from these Western establishments.

“My work on the front page of The New York Times used to make me ecstatic, proud for my nation," Alsultan tells SceneNowSaudi. "Now, I don’t want to be associated with them.”

Over a 15-year-long career, Alsultan’s photography has appeared in more than 20 exhibitions around the world from Paris to Nepal. She entered the field by photographing kids and families, and then transitioned to weddings. Now, her work spans a range of subjects across documentary, commercial and portrait photography. In addition to speaking at the United Nations and winning some of the most prestigious awards in the photography world, Alsultan has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and Bloomberg, among other household-name publications.

Alsultan challenges stereotypes of the Arab World, and specifically Saudi Arabia, by capturing intimate women-only spaces that are otherwise difficult for journalists to access. She defines her audience as those inside and outside of Saudi who want to see the country in a way they haven’t before.

Alsultan photographs Saudi women as few have seen them—uncovered in their homes, gossiping with their friends, celebrating birthdays on farms, driving quad bikes and dancing in the desert with huge speakers and a DJ—with no men to be seen.

For decades, women in Saudi Arabia had limited visibility in public life. Photography, particularly of women, was heavily restricted.

When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) introduced his Vision 2030 reforms in 2016, the Kingdom saw sweeping changes which granted women the right to drive, lifted bans on cinemas and concerts, and directed investment towards the arts. “It all happened very quickly,” Alsultan says, calling it a “positive domino effect.”

“The government pushed women to the forefront instead of always being in the background, or invisible. That’s when we started seeing ourselves everywhere,” she explains. “In the past you really had no space. Everything was segregated—restaurants, coffee shops, even malls had specific days for men, everything else for women and families.”

Having lived equally between the West and the Middle East—between the US, UK, Dubai, Bahrain, and now Saudi—Alsultan gained unique insights into the damaging stereotypes she wanted to challenge through her work. She finds it infuriating that Arab women are portrayed as powerless or victimised by men. She pushes back against the idea that husbands force their wives to cover, and the post-9/11 representation of Arab men as violent.

“I find many stories of women who fought, and became whatever they wanted despite constraints from government, religion, or society,” Alsultan says. “These women are my superheroes.”
In Alsultan’s favourite project to date, ‘Saudi Tales of Love’, she photographed women across the marriage spectrum—from having never wed to being happily married, divorced and widowed—to answer two questions: “Do we need marriage to signify that we have love? Do you need a husband to have a significant life?”

The series was a turning point of her career, made possible by her 2015 acceptance into the Arab Documentary Photography Program (ADPP).

Alsultan herself was married at 17, and divorced her spouse after an unhappy 10-year marriage.
“Only later, I realised that there were many Saudi women who had similar experiences beyond my expectations of a typical Saudi housewife,” she wrote on her website about the inspiration for her project.

After she published her project in 2016, it exploded, and her career took off. ‘Saudi Tales of Love’ was published in TIME LightBox, a platform that showcases the best of documentary photography. One of the photos was even on the cover of Time Magazine and later printed in the Instagram headquarters in New York. In 2019, Alsultan received the Catchlight Fellowship to continue her work photographing women.

“The women from ‘Saudi Tales of Love’ are my role models, my sisters. Each of them has exhibited something I could never find anywhere else,” Alsultan says.

She photographed women like X, who fell in love in dental school and married her classmate. They had a son and a daughter. The day before they signed the lease on their first home, her husband died in a tragic motorcycle accident. In the photo Alsultan captured, X wears her wedding dress, a symbol of her happy marriage. In the shadowy background her teenage son wears his father’s thobe. X waits for her son to turn 18 to become her legal male guardian. Until then, it’s her half-brother she hasn’t met.

In another photo from the city of Hail, Umm Ahmed serves and sells coffee. Now in her early 60s, she got married over 40 years ago. When her husband wouldn’t allow their two sons to pursue their education, she collected money to help him find a second wife, gave him the dowry, and said, “I want you to divorce me.” He did. Today, she is a proud mother of two sons who served in the military and are nearly retired.

But Alsultan’s favourite photo is a photo of a woman named Ohood, diving in 2016.
“Saudi women can’t drive, but they can dive,” the caption read, at a time before the laws changed.

When Ohood divorced her husband, she got nothing. Not the money nor her daughter, who she could only see two nights a month.

"My parents are divorced. My brother is divorced. My friends are divorced. Everyone I know who married out of love, isn't in love any more. I got divorced, not once, but twice,” Alsultan recites, repeating Ohood’s powerful quote.

She photographed and stayed with Ohood in 2016. During COVID, she found out that she met someone in America, fell in love, and got married for the third time. But soon after, her husband caught COVID and passed away. And then, Ohood also died after being diagnosed with COVID.
“That image always gives me goosebumps, always makes me tearful,” Alsultan says. “I wish she were still here to be celebrated.”

The first time the New York Times international photo editor saw Alsultan’s images, he said, “These are not Saudi. I can get anyone else to photograph better images.”

Alsultan asked, “Which white male photographer do you have coming into Saudi and photographing Saudi women in their homes like this?”

He looked at her again and said, “Well… this isn’t Saudi.”

“This is not the Saudi you expected,” Alsultan corrected. “Saudi women don’t cover their faces in their own homes. They don’t wear hijab among other women. That’s why segregation exists: we want to live freely without constraints by men.”

The reaction of the New York Times photo editor pointed to larger gaps and biases in Western media coverage of the Arab World that came to a tipping point after October 7th, 2023, when no media outlet was able to enter Gaza.

“They hit a wall,” Alsultan says. “Before, whether it was Saudi, Egypt, or Lebanon, coverage was one-sided, but we didn’t know. We trusted. Now the veil has been lifted—we see clearly how this bias has caused the deaths of many colleagues in Gaza.”

The past two years have redefined journalism as audiences turn away from legacy media and towards alternative voices without Western editorial constraints that live on platforms like Instagram and TikTok—despite shadow bans that target pro-Palestine speech.

Alsultan is one of them, using her platform with nearly 200 thousand followers to amplify stories coming out of Gaza.

When asked about ensuring accuracy as an independent journalist without an established publication’s oversight, Alsultan responded that organisations like the New York Times weren’t supportive anyway.

“When my images were stolen, they didn’t support me. When numbers or captions were wrong, especially in Gaza, they weren’t corrected. Writers were biased, often with family in the IDF,” she explains. “Do I trust them? Never. Keep your money, keep your platforms—we can do better. We can show our real traditions and values without hypocritical parachute journalism. We don’t need them to ‘give us voices’. We already have many voices.”

But the stories that will reach people the most effectively are those that are accessible—that use storytelling and humour as a conduit for connection, Alsultan said. Some use travel and food, while others use music and art. She used the Netflix show 'Mo' as an example, a comedy-drama series that follows a young Palestinian man in Houston, Texas.

“'Mo' tells a beautiful story, but if it were only about genocide or Gaza, people would be exhausted and not follow,” she says, adding that the same is true for the Saudi women’s stories she captures through photography. People around the world relate to the struggles and complexities of marriage.

Now, Alsultan is working on a photo book that brings together the photos from ‘Saudi Tales of Love’, her ongoing project which she renamed 'And Then There Were Women'.

“Because,” she says, “suddenly Saudi women are everywhere.”