Jananne Al-Ani is a photographer and video artist whose work explores the representation and conspicuous absence of the human body. At the beginning of her career, she made work that depicted veiled women, examining stereotypes of Orientalism and cultural identity and more recently, she has focused on landscapes, using aerial video and photography to show ambiguous sites with traces of inhabitation or seeming abandonment. This piece, "Aerial I," is a photograph used in her "Shadow Sites II" video, which the MFA co-acquired with SFMOMA in 2014. From an airplane, Al-Ani captured sites in the Jordanian landscape, many of which are visible only when sunlight projects at a low angle onto the terrain. The resulting images reveal traces of natural and man-made activity below. Her marriage of nature, flight, and photographic technology references the history of photography—earlier 20th-century aerial photography and more recent satellite imaging used during the 1991 Desert Storm campaign and the 2003 Gulf War. It also serves as a means to cast doubt on the truth of testimony and memory. The revelation of latent images in the landscape brings to the surface latent myths of Middle Eastern identities. Al-Ani herself describes the work, “it explores the disappearance of the body in the landscapes of the Middle East by examining what happens to the evidence of atrocity and genocide and how it affects our understanding of the often beautiful landscapes into which the bodies of victims disappear.”

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