As Amber Moyles writes in her essay for the Drawing Center show, Raissnia’s works “counter the function of photography presumed at its invention: the representation of an unequivocal image, one that bears a closed meaning that the observer can easily read. In the famed 1839 presentation to the French Chamber of Deputies, the physicist François Arago argued that the state should acquire the patent for the daguerreotype, an early photographic process, because the medium could be useful for surveying foreign territories and thus serve as a tool for expanding the imperial colonies. The photographers Luigi Pesce and Antoin Sevruguin, among others, sent images of the ruins of Persepolis in southwestern Iran to ethnographical societies and museums, fixing an image of Iran in a state of deterioration in the European Orientalist imagination. The clarity of images by Pesce and Sevruguin served to communicate an incontrovertible narrative to viewers, one that perpetuated stereotypes of the Middle East as falsely in need of Western protection.” While Raissnia also employs images of an archaeological site, in contrast, by cropping, erasing, superimposing and distorting them, her work opens up and complicates the possible denotations of the original photographs.