Olivia Arthur began working as a photographer in 2003 after moving to Delhi; in 2006 she took a one-year residency with Fabrica in Italy, during which she began working on a series about women and the East-West cultural divide. This work has taken her to the border between Europe and Asia, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
In 2009, the British Council invited her to teach a two-week photography workshop to a group of women in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; after which she returned to London with rolls of undeveloped film and the start of her photo story. ‘Jeddah Diary’ is an intimate, fragmentary portrait of the women Arthur came to know and spend time with in Saudi Arabia; ‘a story that is as much about the lens of photography as it is an intimate, if slightly disorienting, view into the complex visual layers of Saudi women’s everyday existence.’
London-born Olivia Arthur studied mathematics at Oxford University and photojournalism at the London College of Printing; she has recently been invited to join Magnum.
A saudi woman poses in the kitchen in her abaya
