This piece by Tal Shochat is part of “The Iranian Series” featuring photographs inspired by Persian miniatures. This work specifically references the image of a woman standing in a bathing basin, against a background of Armenian tiles. Her mother immigrated to Israel from Tripoli and her father from Iran, and both regularly appear in her photographs, alongside models of Middle Eastern origin. The Middle Eastern world—with its figures, appearance, colors, culture, and orientalist stereotypes—is present in most of Shochat’s photographs, and the cumulative effect of her work brings a new-old Levant to Israeli art. The image of a girl sitting next to a fountain holding a drum echoes orientalist images from the 19th century. A strategy of reappropriation allows Shochat to “purify” the oriental gaze from the negative connotations attributed to it, embracing it and infusing it with a spirit of liberation.