BJP: In first delving into the WIT archive, I suppose you were, naturally, braced for material of a quite brutal nature? But what surprised you?  

Carmen Winant: Yes, I think the curator, Ksenia Nouril, and I feared that we might encounter really grisly material. Instead, across this 50-year-old archive, we found so much more: material that was collected from the outside world (newspaper clippings) and generated for public access (35mm re-enactment slides), documentation of their organisational efforts (photographs), teaching and learning material (appropriated pictures made into “puzzles”) and so on. These were tools, so many of them photographic, in service of empowerment. That was what kept us going on this project, to be honest. While it was filled with horror, it was also amazingly life-affirming, full of joy and feminist coalition-building.

Later, NCADV, another domestic violence organisation based in Denver, also shared their archive, which likewise fed the project in so many ways. Both organisations were founded at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, 40 and 50 years ago, respectively, and that movement philosophy – confronting and undoing patriarchal power structures through strategies of care and coalition – lives on.

 

BJP: Because domestic violence so often (if not always) happens in the “shadows”, how did you navigate the problems and possibilities of visualising it? Could you speak about the large newspaper clipping constellation, for example?

CW: It’s the most confrontational work in the show, and indeed about looking as much as anything. It offers tremendous (if painful) evidence of domestic and gendered violence all in one place. But there’s also something coded about it. [The clippings] are pieces of media. Determinations have been made about what sort of images should attend which stories, and how those stories should be told at all. So they are primary documents yet also exist at a distance from the experiences of survivors. 

More and more, I try to have a light touch. My job as an artist, a feminist, a student of this history, is to animate the archive, which already holds such immense power. In this sense, I think of myself less as an “archives artist” or something, and more as an artist who often uses or assembles archives in service of the agendas of feminist histories, organisations, individuals. Of course, I was terrified to make “artwork” of a subject and experience like domestic violence – to aestheticise it. So little artwork contends with this subject, and when and where it does, it is most often (or always) documentary. 

“More and more, I try to have a light touch. My job as an artist, a feminist, a student of this history, is to animate the archive, which already holds such immense power. In this sense, I think of myself less as an “archives artist” or something, and more as an artist who often uses or assembles archives in service of the agendas of feminist histories, organisations, individuals.”

BJP: How you have animated the archives is really powerful, showing how their “material” is inseparable from humans and their labour. After all, the archives are not only about the stories of survivors but the custodians of these stories…

CW: Right, real people make these places run. And it’s the staff who appear in so many of the photographs in the archive: attending conferences and after-parties, staging and taking pictures for training purposes (such as self-defence exercises, obtaining legal services, conducting job searches, what to pack when leaving an abusive relationship)… It was important for us to learn from them and to inculcate their ways of working where we could. So, for instance, the plants in the exhibition are derived from the plants around their offices – indications of life, blooming and sustaining. The construction paper in the collages is derived from the paper and colours that are in the window in WIT’s childcare room. The pictures of the T-shirts from the Clothesline project were made across the WIT office. The buttons in the plexi box pinned into corkboard is a move to echo how their offices function, and hold relics of their movement history. The project is as much about these spaces, these organisations and the staff that uphold them as it is about “domestic violence” as a category of experience.

 

BJP: In your recent book, Instructional Photography (2021), you theorised the ways in which photographs can teach us how to live… How printed matter can – through its power to reproduce – facilitate social organisation and “self-actualisation”. The logic between the book and the exhibition seems totally related… 

CW: I wrote the essay (that became the book) somewhere in the middle of working on this project. I think I’ve always been interested in instructional photography, I just never knew how to name it. In my studio, I’ve generally organised found material in terms of its content: pictures of breast self-exams, pap smears, pottery, dealing with bodily injury, healing… Slowly, I started to realise that the throughline between these pictures was that they sought to teach something to their viewer. This is such a specific goal, so “un-Art”… Maybe, for that reason, it took me some time to understand and appreciate it as its own meaningful, and viable, category. Once I hit on that, those rigid categorisations between images started to dissolve. This project is enmeshed with those same problem-sets. Fundamentally, it asks: how can we use pictures as pedagogical tools? How can they be weaponised against us? What is the capacity for pictures not only to teach, but to disseminate life-saving information?

“The question of how art and photography can function to help women and deconstruct violence against them is at the centre of the project, and the Power Control Wheel embodies this.”

BJP: A primary example of closing this space between art and information is the “Power Control Wheel”…

CW: The question of how art and photography can function to help women and deconstruct violence against them is at the centre of the project, and the wheel embodies this. It’s a commonly used tool of domestic violence support organisations (as well as rape crisis centres and beyond) to help identify abuse. It’s really functional and immediate: a graphic device (in a non-hierarchical, circular configuration) that can be very easily shared. So it felt really important to not only have in the exhibition, but make as a risograph take-away. As in, people who come to the show can bring its information and points of access home with them.

 

BJP: This transcending of the gallery space is perhaps most prominent in your bus shelter interventions, which provoke critical (and social) responses from pedestrians  in a very Brechtian way…

CW: Yes, I’m really excited about this piece. There are several dozen public transit bus shelters across Philadelphia that hold images of the T-shirts. Each is a single image, larger than life, with basic information about the show as well as WIT, along with their website. These are not only public spaces but commercial ones, where WIT or another organisation might list their hotline. The idea here is that, much like the take-aways, this material lives in, and is circulated across, its world. It’s a question that I’ve come to wrestle with more and more as an artist: can art be serviceable? What are its capacities in movement-building and life-saving? I don’t know the answer to that, but I feel incredibly driven by the attempt.

 

BJP: Do you feel optimistic about how the project might relate to national conversations and even policy today? 

CW: Well, depending on the day, I feel more or less hopeful about the capacity of art to effect (and shift) discourse and policy. This project has two real aims: to create undeniable visibility as it comes to the matter of domestic violence and abuse, which lives in the shadows of our society. It also hopes to affirm the values of feminist organising; its pedagogical tools, coalition strategies, profound imagination and investment in care. 

BJP: Regarding this investment in care, I’m interested to hear about how you see your artworks in relation to the future of the archive. 

CW: The question is an interesting one: what happens to the archive, any archive, after it has been re-arranged, picked apart, re-animated in a new context? The answers have varied and are still being worked out, but the idea was never to subsume them into a single body. Some material will go back into the archive from which it came. Some will stay intact, in a new form (in a framed collage, let’s say) and will live on the walls of its organisation. And, for some, the conversation takes a new shape entirely: in the case of NCADV, we are now working together to place their materials in a public-facing, institutional archive, conversations that have stemmed from this collaborative process. 

 

BJP: How was this experience for you on an emotional level? 

CW: Honestly, I found that I often had to almost dissociate to carry on. It can be too painful otherwise. An entire box of restraining orders. 500 newspaper clippings that describe women being beaten and tortured and murdered. For the most part, I kept it at an arm’s length so as to continue through it. Now that the exhibition and the bus shelters are up (with public programmes and a publication to follow), I find that it is all beginning to pour in. A wall came down once I had seen its installation. And so, I find that although I am relieved and grateful, I also can’t stop crying. While it has only affirmed my belief in feminist movement-building and building spaces that affirm the dignity and agency of women and vulnerable people, the grief is there too. We carry on.

A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures runs at The Print Center, Philadelphia, until 16 July 2022.

For 45 days, Rojee walked through the arid Spanish countryside. She stayed in albergues, small hostels dotted along the route. At first, the plan was to make portraits of the hospitaleros, the hosts and helpers who worked there. But long days of walking didn’t allow for much time to connect with people at the pit stops. Instead, she turned her lens to the nature that she was immersed in every day.

The result is her project, Valley of Paradise. Contrary to the initial plan, there are almost no people in Rojee’s images. “That was a big decision in the photographs,” she explains. “Partly because I was relishing the solitude… I’m quite a solitary person anyway, but I wanted to see what it would be like to be remote for that long.” 

Instead, the work is populated by vast, grassy landscapes, sleepy country houses and farm animals. In one image, the patchy hide of a cow glistens, catching the sunlight on its undulating belly. In another, a quiet terrace lined with tombstones and crosses lies in the shadow of a fiery, orange mountain. 

There is a sense of movement too, and the oscillation between dusk and dawn. “It’s like one long meditation,” she says of the experience. “Often you end up daydreaming, it’s an out-of-body experience and you don’t realise you’re walking.”

Rojee spent many months reworking the narrative. Then, in March 2021, the news of Sarah Everard’s murder shocked the nation. Everard, 33, was walking home alone in London when she was kidnapped and brutally murdered by a police officer. “It was then that I realised what this project was actually about,” says Rojee. 

While the work began with a sense of adventure, with time it took on new meaning. Rojee began to consider the act of walking alone, as a woman. She remembered how her loved ones worried for her safety, and the constant mental battles that she had to overcome along the way too. 

“When I looked at my images again, I realised that this feeling does come through,” she says. “I didn’t see it before, but there’s this slightly scary, slightly sinister stuff.”

Along the way, Rojee developed a particular affection for the horses, which feature several times in the project. She remembers her moments with these majestic beasts as some of the most special, and later, illustrative of the meaning she is conveying with the work. 

“Although all the horses I saw, bar two, were tied up, that too is symbolic of the struggle between the tension of having this wilderness available to me, but with the undercurrent of those worries and fears.” She adds: “You just have to keep moving forward. There’s always going to be danger out there, but you need to keep going. What else are you going to do?” 

ameenarojee.co.uk

Elsewhere, the physical interventions continue. “The opening image is a collage that was made with a female group portrait found in a 1950s high school yearbook,” she explains. “A third of the women’s faces are [cut out and] replaced with fragments of red vernacular images, reflecting the fact that one in three women globally are subjected to violence.” The faces of the remaining portraits are removed too, emphasising that the issue is structural and worldwide, and not about the individuals in the photographs. The cuts she makes in the images are rough and jagged, “expressing my sheer rage about these facts,” she adds. 

Mingueza trawled the 2021 UN Women report for important facts and figures, and hand wrote them on the backs of the found photographs she used in the series. It is the part of pictures we never normally see, further highlighting the theme of invisibility. 

Based between London and Cordoba, Mingueza recently completed an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at UAL, where One in Three Women was exhibited as part of her final project. In sharing this work, she hopes to encourage awareness of gender-based violence, and show how unconventional narratives can be used to explore the issue in an impactful way, without sensationalising the subject or re-victimising victims. In the end, a story told in a damaging way can be worse than telling no story at all.

nievesmingueza.com

For more information on VAWG and the statistics that informed this work, please visit: https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures

Helplines 

If you have been affected by any of the topics discussed in this article or if you are experiencing domestic abuse, you can seek help and advice from the following organisations:

Domestic Abuse Helpline (in the UK). Freephone, 24-hour helpline: 0808 2000 247.

National Domestic Violence Hotline (in the US). Helpline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).

Hot Peach Pages. International abuse information in over 115 languages.

Once a year, Malaysia’s skinheads meet for dinner. MASKAD, the Malaysia Skinhead Annual Dinner & Festival, unites the nation’s punk scene, bringing various political ideologies and found families together under one roof. Across the world at events such as MASKAD, punk lives on. Jess Kohl’s latest project, Disciples, documents the lives of Kuala Lumpur’s skinheads, with who she spent 10 days. 

“My work often examines youth culture and identity, as I’m interested in people who are on a journey, coming to terms with their identity in some way,” Kohl explains. Her past projects have explored queer lives along the American Bible Belt, the Philippine punk scene, and Buttmitzvah, London’s queer Jewish club night.

“I read an article about the skinhead scene in Malaysia, and it explained there were two opposing factions: a very kind of strong anti-fascist movement, and then, a neo-nazi movement, ” Kohl explains. ‘Skinhead’ —as a fashion, politic, and culture — can summon differing images for different people. The iconography finds its origins in the punk music scene of the 70s. The characteristic shaved head of skinheads has become a style adopted by both sides of the political compass. For Disciples, Kohl collaborated with the anti-fascist skinhead movement, a group she had been in contact with for many years prior. 

Kohl’s compassion and friendship with the group are clear. The images depict the group as a family, united through shared beliefs and iconography. “Ultimately it is documentary, but I want my work to straddle the line between documentary and art,” she explains.” [The group’s] beliefs are very anti-fascist, and they spend time at this venue 10 floors up in this unassuming building. You go up the lift and then down a corridor into this room, which has been turned into a DIY gig space. There are signs everywhere that say ‘no homophobia, no racism.”

“I have personal experience in trying to find the place where parts of my identity can coexist with my queer identity. I’ve been drawn to documenting these kinds of experiences,” Kohl continues. Malaysia is a majority Muslim nation, and faith works in tandem with the groups punk politics. Contrasting stereotypical understandings of religion as conservative, traditional, and restrictive, Disciples demonstrates the realities of contemporary religious life. 

At the centre of Disciples, Kohl proves that the spirit of punk — its image, its music, and its beliefs — live on. Across the world, messages of unity, solidarity, and a rejection of fascism are heard. The skinheads of Malaysia, and indeed skinheads across the world, exemplify the sub-culture’s relentless strive for self-expression, and the kinds of communities it can create.

Jesskohl.com

Three years ago, Lina Geoushy watched the Netflix film Roma. The film tells the story of Cleo, a housekeeper working in Mexico City during the 1970s. “I was deeply moved by her character, I felt like I knew her,” she explains. “Growing up in Egypt, I’ve seen women like her in so many homes. The woman is like a second mother, she does everything, and at the same time, she has her own family. I cried watching the film.” Splitting her time between her home in Cairo and London, where she was completing a postgraduate degree at the London College of Communication, Geoushy was looking for inspiration for her next project. She found it in Cleo’s story.

The result is her ongoing series Breadwinners, which highlights the lives of Egypt’s often marginalised domestic workers. “The model in the Western world is very different – this isn’t just hiring a cleaner you pay by the hour,” she explains. “They do everything; cook, clean, childcare, grocery shopping, everything.”

There is a duality in the profession, Geoushy explains. The women are seen as part of the family, sometimes even acting as matriarch, while also being an outsider, an employee referred to as “the help.” This blurred line can lead to difficulties. 

The women are paid by the day, which restricts their freedom and makes them dependent on the employer. But, despite the lack of legal validity and security in the domestic industry, housekeeping can also keep their entire families financially supported. Each woman’s experience is unique, but a lack of medical insurance paired with debt are common issues within the profession. “Queuing for very basic treatment compromises their work days,” she explains. With limited savings, many women are forced to borrow money, resulting in debts that can’t easily be paid back. This keeps the women stuck in their jobs, and with no legal recourse available, there can be nowhere to turn. “Many men in the family might not like ‘their’ women working in housekeeping, yet once they start getting money from them, they begin to accept it,” Geoushy explains. “Some men actually send their daughters and wives to work, and they live off what they make, taking control of their income. These women quite literally are the breadwinners.”

“I didn’t want to present them as oppressed victims. There’s a large side of life that doesn’t appear in the media – these women are the ones who are actually providing for their families. I wanted to shed light on their dignity and strength.”

Rather than solely presenting the women’s struggles, Geoushy advocates for a fairer system with her work – one in which these women are given the same workplace rights as their male counterparts. “Simply put, housekeeping is not acknowledged as a profession, with Egyptian labour laws completely leaving them out. They have no legal protection, pensions, or insurance. It is a very labour intensive role, and many of these women work into old age,” she explains. Geoushy uses Breadwinners as evidence, a tool to help remove patriarchal biases present in Egyptian law. “I personally am not going to change the world in a second, but by talking to lawyers, UN organisations, and people in the government, I can help. Hopefully, we can fight for more gender equality within the law,” she explains.

The respect and admiration Geoushy has for these women is evident in the work. For her, it was important that each woman was able to tell her own story.“It was extremely important to avoid any stereotypes of Middle Eastern/ North African  women,” she says. “I didn’t want to present them as oppressed victims. There’s a large side of life that doesn’t appear in the media – these women are the ones who are actually providing for their families. I wanted to shed light on their dignity and strength.”

40-year-old Noha was one of the women interviewed by Geoushy. “At first I was too ashamed to tell my husband that I am a domestic worker and cook, because I felt that it’s not a suitable job. Now, I feel very proud of myself,”she says. Paired with each portrait is information on the sitter; their name, their work, and the struggles they face. When exhibited, their voices can be heard next to their portraits. Each story is unique, with every woman navigating social and legal injustice in different ways.

Breadwinners exhibited at the 2019 100 Heroines exhibition in Blackpool, Doncaster and London, as well as at the 2019 Photocarrefour Re-centering Africa in a Digital Universe exhibition, Nigeria. The project also won the Royal Photographic Society Documentary Photographer of the Year Award in 2019. When travel becomes possible, Geoushy wishes to return to Cairo and continue the series. Breadwinners was only the beginning – her most recent project, Shame Less, tackles the stigma around discussing sexual assault in Egypt. “With Breadwinners, I didn’t want to just present the layers of [the victims’] lives and then not do something about it. I would love to have an outdoor exhibition in Egypt, where we can really champion them – I want these women to see themselves celebrated.”

linageoushy.com

Max Siedentopf

Hope And Hunger

Power is the ability to move something in a particular way. 

Power is the ability to direct the behaviour of others.

Power is the ability to control. 

Power is the ability to alter the course of events. 

Hope And Hunger investigates this power – the power to move the masses.

Using pigeons as a metaphor for the public, the series shows how people in times of need turn to ideologies to give them hope and still their hunger. However at what point does the hunger outweigh the belief of the ideology they join? 

Throughout the experiment, different ideologies were depicted through their symbols. Here we see bird seed in the shape of the holy cross, the peace sign, a swastika, the Star of David, the star and crescent or hammer and sickle innocently lying on the floor. At first the scenes are quiet and abandoned, however no matter what the symbol represents, one by one we see it attracting more followers. The first followers join because they are hungry, they want to still their hunger. As they join, each new follower attracts twice as many more to the point that we can’t distinguish the symbol anymore, which is now completely buried by the overwhelming masses. 

Did the last ones join because they were hungry or because they followed what the others did? 

Power is the ability to move something in a particular way. 

Power is the ability to direct the behaviour of others.

Power is the ability to control. 

Power is the ability to alter the course of events. 

 

Maxsiedentopf.com

Hubert Crabieres

I make the majority of my images in the house I share with my friends in Argenteuil, in the Val d’Oise. My work articulates and confronts staged scenes and living spaces, spectacular and intimate. When I create my photographs, whether they are personal initiatives or commissioned, I accumulate many accessories. To illustrate the term power, I wanted to focus on different meanings of the English term, from the most symbolic to the most concrete. I liked the idea of electric power being deployed in the Argenteuil studio, creating a powerful celebration of colours.

 

Hubertcrabieres.fr

Nonzuzo Gxekwa

Data is Currency 

Your smartphone can record your activities. Big corporations pay top dollar to have access to this information – the power to control and influence consumer decisions and taste. Citizens are under surveillance. 

“He who has data has the power”’ – Tim O’Reilly

 

@nonzuzogxekwa

Elena Cremona 

“Faking phone calls, crossing the street, changing routes, asking to be accompanied home, ignoring catcalls, avoiding dimly lit areas, covering up…these are all realities that shape how women are forced to police themselves in public spaces, not only in the UK but around the world. Many women asked why the narrative always seemed to focus on how victims should protect themselves better. How are men being held accountable and holding themselves accountable?” – Maela Ohana 

 

elenacremona.com

Cemre Yesil

I hold her, she carries me. 

How does a person carry the body, the posture? 

It is my mother who carries my body in this photograph. 

How does one carry the body in a photograph through holding and being held by another body 

– the maternal body?

I handle her,

she handles me.

We understand the world only after handling it. This is a process of handling;

handling a future loss.

 

cemreyesil.com

Al J Thompson

To hold power is to instinctively assume control above any given circumstance. It is a naturally derived component of the ego that we understand is a necessity to human survival. With power comes the responsibility to act upon it without infringement.

The image titled, Looking Up, from my monograph Remnants of an Exodus, references the limitations, hope, and the nuance of the individual. To look up means to invoke power. To invoke power means the acquisition of strength relies on an abstract considered greater-than.

My photographs do not reflect that all is lost. It is a challenge of empowerment. And, I have reasons to believe that fortunes can be turned only if a fragmented community can find ways of kinship. 

 

aljthompson.com

Laura Havlin: The book’s title explains that this is a search for ‘representational justice’. What are the main ways you have found that the representation of prisoners dehumanises them? 

Hatty Nestor: The degree to which prisons both conceal and misrepresent the individuals they detain is, of course, ethically and politically complex and bound to a carceral history of subordination. For instance, since their conception shortly after the invention of photography in 1840, mugshots became a form of representation employed solely for identification purposes within the legal system. This form of portrait-making––which was standardised in 1888 by the French police officer Alphonse Bertillon–– strips prisoners of their individuality. It is inherently dehumanising because the subjects of mugshots have their representational liberty removed. The widespread distribution of mugshots in the media perpetuates the racial bias of attributing certain groups to criminal behaviour. This public circulation of mugshots generates a punitive representation of shaming and arrest.

The process of dehumanisation extends beyond the confinement of prisons to all sectors of the criminal justice system, too. In today’s media, mugshots usually appear in reference to prisoners who might have been incarcerated for sensationalised crimes or a prison scandal. Similarly, drawn and painted portraits — from trial through to incarceration — CCTV footage, courtroom sketches and criminal e-fits, all suspend the subject’s agency. All these forms of identification are inhumane as they purposefully dehumanise the images’ subjects by stripping them of all personality, individuality and agency.

LH: The incarcerated population is often described as ‘invisible’, with a lack of interaction with the outside. Who are the mediators responsible for constructing the images of incarcerated individuals? 

HN: Representation is fraught with ethical quandaries and injustices; it is not always liberatory in and of itself. And the same goes for complete invisibility. Invisibility also ties into prison architecture and location. Prisons often sit outside of towns, in unpopulated areas, which reinforces the rhetoric of ‘out of sight out of mind’. 

Several photographers have captured prisoners through photojournalism. Carl de Keyzer photographed the gulags and prison camps in Zona: Siberian Prison Camps (2000-2002). And Mikhael Subotzky’s series Die Vier Hoeke: The Four Corners  (2004-2006) captured the conditions of South African Prisons. Both photographers portrayed inhumane realities that might have otherwise remained unseen. 

The project Captured, which I explore in chapter four, utilises the artistic abilities of prisoners to draw ‘who should be in their place’. The portraits also include Garrett Rushing, CEO of Citigroup, and were commissioned to make a political commentary on the invisibility of prisoners and how the US justice system prosecutes people in society for the most minimal transgressions. What is interesting about Captured is that the mediators are the inmates. Therefore, the prisoners gain some visibility through the portraits they produce. However, the images further compound an over-representation of privileged individuals who are not held accountable, all of who already have widespread representation.

LH: You write that this lack of interaction “minimises the possibility for empathetic encounters with those who are most marginalised”. In what ways can more equitable and empathetic depictions be fostered? 

HN: Empathy, and its relationship to sympathy and ethics, were things I often considered while writing Ethical Portraits. The question of ethics is intrinsic to depicting or representing others, just as the power relations between the sitter and the artist steep the history of portraiture. 

I found one quote in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams (2004) particularly useful in thinking about these issues. She writes, “empathy isn’t just something that happens to us––a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain––it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves”. Jamison proposes that we have a choice about whom and what we feel empathy for. By extension, the images produced of prisons and inmates were made out of choice. And how they are produced, framed, and disseminated all influence a broader societal perception of incarceration. 

In terms of the portraits I engage with, in Ethical Portraits, it often wasn’t the images themselves that could foster empathy or function equitably, but the context of their production and intentionality. I was also implicated in this, and I considered how I could present the interviews I conducted as a form of portrait-making. When considering this question of intent, I always returned to Susan Sontag’s philosophy of photography, particularly her observation: “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” There is a cautionary lesson here: it is almost impossible to foster empathy with a person reduced to an object. Empathetic or equitable portraiture is only possible when the photographer intends to humanise, not objectify, the subject.

LH: After listening to This American Life Lock-Up series, where you heard a prisoner describing the lack of variety they’re exposed to, you write: “What struck me most about his comments was how starkly prison-industrial complexes violate the agency of those they detain, limiting prisoners’ ability to connect with each other and the outside world, and most of all, denying any assertion of individual identity.” In what ways can more representational justice help to give incarcerated people back some autonomy over their identity? 

HN: The limitations of visibility discussed in the show resonated with the research I was undertaking about the Chelsea Manning case. While in solitary confinement, Manning’s support network commissioned the illustrator Alicia Neal to draw an alternative portrait of her––as the media had continued using her military photograph. Here, a representational justice was achieved because the media could instead circulate an image aligned to Manning’s gender identity. The alternative portrait was necessary due to a misrepresentation, not an absence of imagery.

Yet with Alyse Emdur’s project Prison Landscapes – the subject of chapter five [and images from which also feature above]––the opposite is true. The project brings together 100 photographs collected between 2005 and 2013 of inmates standing in front of painted backdrops in prison visitation rooms. Vivid colours are often used to create each landscape, and they are utopian in composition and tone, offering an alternative to the architectural and psychic constraints of prison. The circulation of these images is often intimate: most are sent to the detainee’s loved ones––to supplement or override, the only other image of them produced while in prison. The landscapes thereby stand against a lack of visibility. But also resist the participants being coded only as inmates — so the pursuit of representational justice, and a sense of autonomy, in opposition to an institutionalised portrait that offers no alternative representation.

LH: How is this intensified with transgender prisoners being able to assert their identities? You have a section in your book on Chelsea Manning, where this is explored in relation to a particularly famous example. Could you talk about your exploration of Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s project with Chelsea Manning, and perhaps how the issues explored extend to more marginalised and ‘invisible’ people?

HN: Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s work with Manning — the artworks Probably Chelsea (2017) [above] and Radical Love (2015) [below] — are compelling for two reasons relating to gender representation. Firstly, they both allowed Manning to assert her identity as a trans woman and as an artistic expression of gender oppression societally. Manning’s DNA was sent to Dewey-Hagborg from within prison (via cheek swabs and hair), from which Dewey-Hagborg algorithmically generated 30 gender-neutral portraits. Dewey-Hagborg subverted this technology to re-orientate Manning’s identity and demonstrated that these forms of identification are both an invasion of privacy while demonstrating that law enforcement abides by a strict outdated gender binary. 

In Chelsea Manning’s case, the subject of chapter one, her initial representation while incarcerated was her military photograph. What Chelsea Manning’s case communicates, beyond the political implications of whistleblowing, is that the treatment of trans inmates is bound to the dehumanising violence of the state and deeply entrenched in this system. This is where the pursuit of prison abolition is necessary to dismantle state violence within incarceration. Transgender activist Reina Gossett speaks widely about the prerequisite for prison abolition when she says, “without prisons, nobody would be disposable in the series.” The Cece McDonald case also demonstrates how Black, transgender women are prosecuted for acts that are self-defence for hate crimes and how the police state is discriminatory and prejudiced. Wider society already compounds the ability to assert transgender identity, and so prison––an institution where selfhood is stiped––only exaggerates this. 

Ethical Portraits is available to purchase here. 

Ferrato did not foresee the sense of hope that the outcome of the 2020 election would instil in her and countless others. “I thought many people in this country had lost their way,” she says. “[The government] was humiliating, disempowering, and mocking everyone who stands for humanity” – including women. To date, 26 women have accused the former president of “unwanted sexual contact”. Throughout his presidency, Trump’s rhetoric further cemented his misogyny; the infamous Access Hollywood recording of him saying, “Grab ‘em by the pussy”, released in the lead-up to the 2016 election, only the tip of the iceberg. Within Trump’s administration itself, women held a minority of appointments. The president also pressured government agencies to omit words relating to reproductive and sexual rights, such as ’foetus’ and ’transgender’, in documents and resources, or to delete those resources altogether. 

Legislatively, from the moment he entered office, Trump and his administration set to work chipping away at the health, employment, economic security and general rights of women, LGBTQ+, and other minority groups at home and abroad. For instance, Trump’s administration cut funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which provides family planning and reproductive services to over 150 countries worldwide. At home, Trump reduced funding to federal agencies supporting reproductive health and victims of domestic abuse. He nominated the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was also accused of sexual assault, to the Supreme Court, thereby threatening the landmark 1973 ruling Roe v Wade, which protects a woman’s right to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The list goes on. 

The defining moment

As the “pussy grabber” – as Ferrato has referred to him – and his administration set to work, the photographer hastily began assembling her work into what would become Holy. A publication that rifts off the Bible and subverts the Holy Trinity (three sections divide it: the mother, the daughter, and the others who believe in women), Holy is a call to action. It celebrates the strength and prowess of women (“Believers. Non-believers. Young. Old. Cis. Trans. Living. Dead,” in Ferrato’s words) in the face of a world continually threatening their safety and freedom. The book collates work spanning the period from the sexual revolution of the 1960s to the #MeToo era of today and thereby attests to the reality that sexism and violence against women never really disappear. Instead, they inhabit new guises within workplaces and homes and the systems and infrastructures that compose our patriarchal world. “I was so down. I was like a crazy woman,” says Ferrato, reflecting on her mindset following the 2016 presidential election. “But, through the process [of creating the book], I was empowered. I was like a dry piece of cotton, and I needed these women to fill me up and make me wet and wild again. Reliving these women’s courage gave me hope.” The process of reflecting on the tenacity of women, despite their abuse and oppression, strengthened Ferrato; a strength she hoped the book would instil in others.

Holy encompasses myriad threats facing women, including domestic violence, the subject for which Ferrato’s work is best known. It was witnessing domestic violence in person, almost 40 years ago, that incited her to commit her practice to document it. A grainy black-and-white image captures this moment [below]. A husband reaches out to hit his wife; his hand obscures her face, but, reflected in the mirror behind them, we see Ferrato, camera raised, bearing witness. It was 1982, and the photographer, on commission for Japanese Playboy magazine, had been spending time with wealthy swingers, including wife and husband, Elisabeth and Bengt. One night, enraged by Elisabeth supposedly slighting him, Bengt beat his wife into the corner of the bathroom in their suburban New Jersey home. It was the ease with which he hit her and the entitlement he felt that galvanised Ferrato. Domestic violence was terrifying, but in that instance, it was also unsettlingly mundane. “This is the moment that changed my life,” she told The Guardian in 2019. “It changed Elisabeth’s life. I don’t know what it did to her husband – I don’t think he cared at all. But for the two of us women, it changed our lives.”

Elisabeth eventually left her husband and “remade herself as a single mother,” reads the handwritten annotation that accompanies the image. (Ferrato wrote annotations to sit alongside every photograph in Holy.) Ferrato, meanwhile, documented domestic violence to raise awareness of it. Between 1976 and 1987, a reported 25,765 women in the US were killed by their partners, a figure that does not reflect the thousands of abused women who did not die. The photographer spent the following decade attending demonstrations and conferences, frequenting courtrooms and emergency rooms; living in women’s shelters and prisons; attending abusers’ therapy groups and women’s self-defence classes, and riding with the police. Her emotive, black-and-white aesthetic lent itself to the subjects she was photographing. Ferrato candidly framed the anguish, terror, and strength of the abused women and their children behind her lens. However, photo editors were generally reluctant to publish the images. To get the work into the world, the photographer put together the landmark photobook Living with the Enemy, designed by her then-partner, photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, and published by Aperture in 1991. At the time, the project enacted social and political change, helping to pressure Congress to pass the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, designed to improve the prosecution of individuals who committed acts of violence against women. 

Taking back control

While working on domestic violence, Ferrato continued photographing sex clubs, swingers’ events and other forms of experimentation and lovemaking; subjects that had compelled her since the start of her career. In 2004, she published Love & Lust, which captures human intimacy in varied forms. Holy is distinct in that it blends Ferrato’s work on domestic violence with her work on sex. Previously, Ferrato kept these two focuses separate, but to bring the two subjects together is to begin to depict “the whole spectrum of the truth of what it is to be a woman”, as her stepdaughter and feminist writer Katherine Holden describes it in one of the book’s forewords. Sex is central to women reclaiming control over their bodies and their lives. “The women’s movement has always been about sex, about women reclaiming their orgasms, abortions, births – agency over their own lives and wombs – from men who try to control them,” writes journalist Claudia Glenn Dowling in another of Holy’s texts. (Dowling has chronicled history from a female point of view alongside Ferrato for almost 50 years.) And it is undoubtedly the photographs of overt female pleasure in Holy that will unsettle many readers more than those depicting women’s pain. Female pleasure is something we are unaccustomed to seeing. It symbolises women in control of their bodies and their experiences within them. “Love & Lust destroyed my career,” reflects Ferrato, “because people were so shocked. People are so afraid of sex, and women becoming empowered in that way.”

Within Holy, amid images of love, sex, pain, joy, illness, birth and death, sits a portrait of author Margaret Atwood, taken in 1986 [below]. A light, if that is what it is, emanates out behind the curls that softly fall around her knowing expression, giving the impression of a halo. Ferrato shot the portrait a year after the author published The Handmaid’s Tale: a dystopian novel that describes a patriarchal, quasi-Christian, totalitarian military state in which women have no rights and the ruling class of men forcibly impregnate those who remain fertile.

Atwood has famously asserted that the amount of invention within the novel is almost nil. “It’s logical, logical. There is not a single detail in the book that does not have a corresponding reality, either in contemporary conditions or historical fact,” she said in an interview published in Vogue in January 1986. As she wrote the novel, the US was four years into the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan: a man who had won the election on an anti-feminist agenda, and one that courted the electoral potential of the emergence and expansion of the conservative Christian Right, who like Reagan were committed to reversing women’s gains in the 60s and 70s, and denouncing homosexuality, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972. The book resonated with Ferrato then and for her, and many others, gained renewed significance in the Trump and post-Trump world. Holy is a “handmaid’s book” says the photographer, referring to the women’s rights protesters who donned the blood-red capes and white bonnets of the handmaids described in Atwood’s novel throughout Trump’s presidency, emerging en masse ahead of the confirmation of Kavanaugh. They remained an iconic reminder of women’s power and resistance throughout an administration in which the previously unthinkable no longer seemed so far-fetched.

Let us rewind to the siege on the Capitol. The moment in which Trump’s threat to democracy reverberated throughout the world. The next four years will see an administration that has actively committed to improving and protecting women’s rights – headed by a president who helped create the 1994 Violence Against Women Act – lead the country. But the image of Trump’s supporters storming the Capitol building is a warning of what could have been. “We’ve been at it for a long time. And we’re not done,” writes Dowling in Holy. “‘I want women to stand up for their rights and not be submissive to the patriarchy, the man, the priest, the president,” she continues, quoting Ferrato. “The father and the son and the – Holy shit! – we can’t even be in the fucking trinity! Where’s the mother? Women are Holy.” Ferrato’s Holy bears witness to this. It celebrates women in all their powerful complexity. But it is also a reminder that the fight for women’s rights, and the rights of other minority groups, is not over in the US and worldwide, where millions are persecuted and oppressed at the hands of their partners, their communities, and their country’s political regimes. As Dowling continues, “That bright spirit and erotic transgression will, Donna prays, lead another revolution into a future beyond the binary, one of intersectional wholeness. She doesn’t yet know what shape it will take, but she can see the shimmering of its wings.”  

Helplines 

If you have been affected by any of the topics discussed in this article or if you are experiencing domestic abuse, you can seek help and advice from the following organisations:

Domestic Abuse Helpline (in the UK). Freephone, 24-hour helpline: 0808 2000 247.

National Domestic Violence Hotline (in the US). Helpline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).

Hot Peach Pages. International abuse information in over 115 languages.

Holy is published by powerHouse Books, priced $50

Mfinanga: I’ve been thinking about the past year, as have we all. For you, what did the world look like before the pandemic? And what does it look like now? 

Fortune: For me, having lost a parent, [the world] is starkly different. I moved cities, so there is almost no resemblance of pre-Covid-19. Everything is new at this point. Before the pandemic I was assisting, my father was alive, and I lived in Brooklyn. Now, all of those things have changed drastically.

Mfinanga: Who or what has given you the security to adjust to this new chapter? 

Fortune: My family. My little sister helped me out a lot in the process of taking care of my father. My sister, Miranda, and I all live in the same house now [in Austin]. Having my sister around helps me, and all of us, to vent and get that creativity out. We are like this little family, having fun and having the space not to feel like there is an ego when you’re talking about what opportunities you have, or what you are working on, and your frustrations. 

Mfinanga: That’s important. If you don’t have the security of comfort in other people it creates tension within yourself. Speaking of clarity, what clarity did working on this body of work give you?

Fortune: The clarity came from working with Loose Joints, who helped demystify the book-making process. My scope of the project was still small. I only wanted it to be about the process of caregiving for my father, and the idea of my family and the changing nature of time. But as I sent them the contact sheets, Loose Joints pulled out other images. They found common threads through the work and asked me to send more. So I ended up going through everything I’ve ever shot in central Texas, which was, like, 400 images. They helped me see the through-line: how are we going to put this into one piece? So that was the clarity with this project. 

Mfinanga: The book is beautiful, brotha. One of the things I realised was that when there are two or more people in a photograph, they are close. Was that something you observed in hindsight? Or is the proximity of touch something you always want to drive in your work?

Fortune: That is a beautiful observation. Some of it is conscious, and some subconscious. I would say it is conscious in several photographs, but particularly the image of Billie and Minsley [featured image], where Billie is holding Minsley in front of his home in Buda, Texas. That one is also a heteronormative image of a man holding a woman. And I am fully conscious of how that image functions. But I am thinking about the importance of the space of Black love. And protection, strength and vulnerability for Billie and Minsley, but also them having agency – reclaiming that, given how historically so many people and families have had that stripped from them. And how that has such a weight and effect on how we love ourselves and one another. So that is what that image, for me, represents. It represents that reclaiming of love, which systems of oppressions have complicated. There is also touch in many of the images shot with my father because caregiving for him involved embracing, bathing him, turning him over, and changing his bedding. 

Mfinanga: How has it been working on the book? 

Fortune: It has been good. What I wanted to make was a classic-feeling documentary book. Some of my references were Alec Soth’s Looking for Love and Robert Adams. I also wanted to achieve that quality to play on the tropes of that aesthetic. And explore how that lens has been one-sided with the legacy of white documentary photographers who have made these bodies of work, and how one has to view themself back in that lens. It’s like, if I’m not photographing my community like this, then it is not going to be accepted. So the aesthetics are intentional. Now that I’ve finished the book, I’m not going to stay on the black-and-white Walker Evans-esque photographs. That was a point to make before moving on to another idea. 

Mfinanga: Are there any burning questions that you still have about your practice or the world in which your practice exists? 

Fortune: Well, I’m intrigued by persistent observations, almost more than aesthetics. There are photographers who I can tell are curious, just for themselves. That’s where I like to see work made. The process [of making] is significant to how I ultimately read images, like a connection to the subject, and that end relationship when documenting a community. 

I also think about non-Black photographers making stories about Black subjects. I think about the destructive nature of that and the lens placed on the subjects; how that affects people who view the work and see themselves represented in it. And also that, financially, it takes away an opportunity from a Black photographer who could have benefited from it. I think about that as somewhat destructive. I ask myself, as a straight male, am I taking up unnecessary space in a realm? So placing that criticality back on myself is also part of my practice. I try to keep myself in check so that the work does not function unconsciously. I am interested in having those conversations. It is not something from which I run. And that is when things get destructive, be it in a documentary context, but more in a workplace context and how that looks. Once you get to a place on the ladder, there are less and less Black and brown folks. It’s changing, but we have to dialogue about those dynamics because they are continuously shifting.

Mfinanga: Yeah, having a consistent, transparent and accessible dialogue gets us all collectively into a space of harmony because harmony is what we’re looking for, right?

Fortune: Yeah, but I’m also interested in how that standard only falls upon us. Something like white fine art photography does not have to assume that responsibility. Sometimes I have a problem with that. There should be space for Black artists to make work about leisure, or travel, you know what I mean? Until now, something I’ve been thinking about – not even so much in this book, but moving forward – is the idea of strength relating to my father’s declining health. And the experience of seeing your motif of strength dismantled in front of you; how weakness is not a bad thing, but a reality. But some of those strengths, and having to dismantle some of those things, do prepare you for the world. They give you the strength to go out on a limb and try the stuff necessary to break into these spaces. 

Mfinanga: Speaking of strength, was that one of the characteristics your family embedded in you? 

Fortune: Definitely. The big Southern Black family with uncles, grandmother cooking, and grandad, like, real sharp with the insults was, even visually, inspirational. My father was a black belt, so I had this kind of Black kung fu upbringing. My grandmother on my dad’s side is a painter, so that was also inspirational. And music – my family is big into music. The book’s title is I can’t stand to see you cry after a song performed by The Whatnauts. But J Dilla also sampled it. While my father was ill, I would go into his room and put on an oldies mix of The Delfonics, Earth, Wind & Fire, and all of that music. My dad was a drummer, and he played that type of music before he lost his dexterity. Sitting in the room with my dad and listening to the songs they had on CDs, there was a reflection that we didn’t have the language for. It was something you had to cherish at the moment because there was no promise of it replicating. This is my first conversation about the book. I had a lot of anxiety about talking about it because it is about my family.

Mfinanga: Is there an accidental perception of the book that you are afraid of?

Fortune: No, that’s not the issue. It’s feeling like I’m explaining the book to someone. And them feeling bad for me because of parts of the story, like losing my parents. That is missing the point. I’ve had that dynamic happen before. I leave the interview feeling crazy because they don’t understand what I’m saying and how real the psychological impacts of these wider issues are. If someone doesn’t understand when you explain the gatekeeping nature of photography is driving people crazy, you feel crazy by trying to explain it. 

Mfinanga: Yeah, when I started Emmazed, every time I put out an interview, I felt crazy for years. Last year was interesting because it was the first year I didn’t feel crazy, but for the wrong reasons. It was a breaking point because there were specific issues I’d share with solutions to mobilise. But then legacy institutions started attaching social currency to them without helping fix anything. 

Fortune: It’s important to have those conversations about feeling crazy because without that one’s life becomes isolating, which doesn’t help. 

Mfinanga: To harp on about what we talked about earlier, it’s just making that dialogue accessible. I’m not trying to save the world here. I mean, no one can single-handedly fucking save the world. We put so many people on pedestals, and they become like tree trunks. If we all acted like individual branches of a tree, that would make the tree healthier. And I’d love to wrap up with this question: what is something that your practice doesn’t communicate as clearly as your life does?

Fortune: A lot of my work hasn’t been text-heavy because the images were a by-product of the experience. But I want to provide those little nuggets about growing up and dealing with family and all of the things I’ve dealt with. Not a self-help book, but an example. Because there are not many examples of young Black documentary photographers who make it out of the South. I want people to understand the real struggles that went into it. None of it was easy. None of it was pretty. And I think that truly speaks to us all.  

rahimfortune.com
I can’t stand to see you cry is published by Loose Joints.

“Tengo un dragón dentro del corazón,” Carlota Guerrero says. The Spanish phrase translates as  “I have a dragon inside my heart,” and has been the photographer’s guiding mantra since she was a child. It is also the title of her first photobook, which compiles a decade of her fashion photography. Guerreo makes it clear; this book is a culmination of her passions, a celebration of her craft.

“I’ve wanted to do it for a long time,” Guerrero explains. “To put together a body of work in a structured and solid story. The book is the perfect format for it.” Self-taught, Guerrero has collaborated with well-known artists and musicians, including the likes of Arca, Solange Knowles, and Rupi Kaur. Her gentle, heartfelt style paints femininity in new lights. Womanhood, in all its forms, finds a home within her images. 

Throughout the book, published by Prestel, Guerrero is in conversation with herself, creating a reflective narrative. “I’m putting images from 2012 with what I showed last month. They have the same elements, and they morph all into new things. They share the same essence,” she explains. “Every piece is in dialogue, going back and forth in time.”

Tengo un dragón dentro del corazón feels less like a studio shoot, and more like an intimate gathering of like minded bodies. Performance and softness interact throughout the pages, as Guerrero allows both to exist without contention. 

Guerrero describes her process as a series of obsessions, ideas that come alive in the studio. “Once I have an idea, I cannot do anything else. I once tried to run away from my ideas. I realised it was impossible. I commit to them as if it was a marriage,” Guerrero says. These obsessions interact in a web of themes, feelings, and subjects. “I created a map, where every shoot was connected to another one. It’s a circle, the first image relating to the last.

“I have a dragon inside my heart,” she repeats. “I’m very anxious, very driven with a lot of energy. I’m always making things happen. I imagine this dragon in my heart. This dragon helps, and sometimes, you get magic in the studio.”

Carlotaguerrero.com

Tengo un Dragón Dentro del Corazón releases April 27.