Getting too close?

Interesting perspective, thank you for sharing Olivia.

I am experiencing some of these issues you've mentioned while photographing refugees and migrants here in Australia. The problem is that as a man, in some cases I am faced with restrictions when photographing women at all, covered or uncovered. It's an interesting culture, some stricter than others and I'm finding building the trust over time is the only way.

Comment posted by George V on March 31, 2009

Hello Olivia, it's great that you've opened up the airwaves here again to explore interesting topics relating to photography.

i suppose it’s a case of ‘live by the sword, die by the sword‘, the very benefit you collect from being a female also makes you a victim of it. i admit i don’t have loads of sympathy for you as i’ve seen enough of your work to know that you’re making the best of your gender and for me as a male, i get to see females in a light, literally and with narrative, that i wouldn’t if you didn’t both have your gender advantage and your talent.

i think a deeper concept of what you say is the baggage and conscious we bring to social commentary photography in this day and age. If you are a striving photographer you feel forced to reveal ‘something‘. And although most have no sinister intentions, that ‘something’ can often be a ‘someone‘. To reveal something can often be both in good light and bad for it to be balanced with the ‘real‘, or more importantly for it to feel authentic and important to an audience.

for this reason photographers pursing social documentary interests are often been tagged as opportunistic or worse, predatory. and here lies the dilemma, how do you reconcile your ambition as a photographer with that of your prey… i mean your subject matter.

some have done this well. i think you do this well Olivia, you’ve developed an ethic that i’m certain you can live with, and you’ve developed a history of credibility that would ensure the people on the other side of your lens will be more than celebrated, they will be beautified, but in a way that seems still very authentic.

hopefully you remember how deeply i feel about your talent from my last post and you take what i say next without out insult. i think the amount of time, or more importantly the time and patience you have to let the images you succeed with to arrive, is a large part of your success. some ambitious photographers don’t have this patience or this time and are less likely to wait for the ‘images they can live with’ to arrive, so they take what they can get and run.

i’d guess i’d like to bend your question and put one back to you Olivia or anyone else bold enough to fess up. tell me about the images that you passed up, or the images you collected, but never promoted; never promoted because you felt the benefit would come at the exploitation of what was inside those frame lines. or be bolder, tell me about the images where you felt ‘art’ was more important than violating the circumstances of trust, trust either implied or simply a component of your own human conscience. Can anyone really answer that question using the word ‘Never’?

i suppose it wouldn’t be a fair question if i didn’t describe my own demons in this dilemma. i’ve been photographing my acquaintances within my own night-life scene, pretty much exploring the utter fiction of it all. on sunday I printed my 102nd contact sheet, so I‘ve been at it a while. quite often i see a constellation of this pointless fiction that i’m keen to reveal and i photograph it with the trust and respect i’ve earned from years of ‘membership’ (not a gender relationship, maybe a lifestyle relationship).

at this moment in time i think this capture activity, if let to see the light of day, would be extremely exploitive. so i collect these images, but they stay buried with the plan that someday i will present back an edit of these images to those that are relevant in a plea that this is something important to all of us. i guess that’s my ethic right now and if i participated in this project 'only' to collect images i might have a much harder time with that ethic, i guess it’s incidental dimension gives me a humane 'out'.

to steer you question entirely off course and to make the question very concrete, i would like to hear from someone like Jacob Au Sobol tell us what it was like to create Sabine. What was it like to be both a human, a member of the community, a striving photographer eager to apply his talent to produce a visually stimulating piece of work and succeeding with it. Was there ever a feeling of waking the razor’s edge of being a human and being an entrepreneurial photographer? Was there a deliberate capture effort to produce the art, or was there an aspect of incidental.

sorry to be so selfish with this request, but it’s only a slight tangent of you question i suppose.

Best wishes,

Joe

Comment posted by Joe on April 1, 2009

Your perspective is interesting since as a white male I often encounter the same cultural barriers photographing women in the middle east. For the most part the barriers are frustratingly genderless as the camera itself represents the outside looking leeringly and suspiciously into the looking glass of Arab culture. Its interesting you say you feel that as a man you would probably have more of a breadth of material to photograph since the women would already be apprehensive and cover up instead of relaxing and then becoming conscious of the camera all at once. I say its interesting because I have often said that if I were a woman I would be able to break through that side of the barrier but that clearly that isn’t true from what you say.

Inversely women may be more apprehensive in a mans presence but their apprehension very rarely dissipates because of that fear you mentioned of the photos of the women appearing online where any man could access them. That same fear drives the female behavior, I feel, as being a total barrier to photography however being a man my intentions are 'obviously' more illicit so whatever few shots you could assemble mine would be more nefarious (based on the preconceived notion that my intentions are inherently bad).

From what you’ve said the barriers could be more deeply rooted in not only gender but ethnic ownership, based on my own observations that many Arab women are more trusting of an Arab photographer rather than a western photographer since we are in essence standing on the sidelines looking in with our western bias. The same can be said about men too that much is for sure. I suppose familiarity could be your best tool, (keeping in mind that you were only in the Kingdom for 2 weeks or so) if the women came to trust your style and vision they could in theory relax a bit more but in an ideal world you would have more than a few days to spend with the women where they would be able to see your style for themselves. All in all the situation seems fairly frustrated and close to a decade of photographing in the region has yet to yield a one size fits all solution aside from familiarity.

Comment posted by Michael Bou-Nacklie on April 3, 2009

Your perspective is interesting since as a white male I often encounter the same cultural barriers photographing women in the middle east. For the most part the barriers are frustratingly genderless as the camera itself represents the outside looking leeringly and suspiciously into the looking glass of Arab culture. Its interesting you say you feel that as a man you would probably have more of a breadth of material to photograph since the women would already be apprehensive and cover up instead of relaxing and then becoming conscious of the camera all at once. I say its interesting because I have often said that if I were a woman I would be able to break through that side of the barrier but that clearly that isn’t true from what you say.

Inversely women may be more apprehensive in a mans presence but their apprehension very rarely dissipates because of that fear you mentioned of the photos of the women appearing online where any man could access them. That same fear drives the female behavior, I feel, as being a total barrier to photography however being a man my intentions are 'obviously' more illicit so whatever few shots you could assemble mine would be more nefarious (based on the preconceived notion that my intentions are inherently bad).

From what you’ve said the barriers could be more deeply rooted in not only gender but ethnic ownership, based on my own observations that many Arab women are more trusting of an Arab photographer rather than a western photographer since we are in essence standing on the sidelines looking in with our western bias. The same can be said about men too that much is for sure. I suppose familiarity could be your best tool, (keeping in mind that you were only in the Kingdom for 2 weeks or so) if the women came to trust your style and vision they could in theory relax a bit more but in an ideal world you would have more than a few days to spend with the women where they would be able to see your style for themselves. All in all the situation seems fairly frustrated and close to a decade of photographing in the region has yet to yield a one size fits all solution aside from familiarity.

Comment posted by Michael Bou-Nacklie on April 3, 2009

sorry for being so slow to reply to your comments on this, and thanks for posting.

I am now back from Saudi and have more of an opportunity to think about the experience as a whole.

the first thing I wanted to say is that I do realise that overall it wouldn't actually be easier to take pictures in Saudi as a man. I had originally posted these comments more because I had been so surprised that there could have been any advantages trying to do this work as a man. Of course as a man you might often not be allowed to take photographs at all even when the women are covered. I also encountered this problem when trying to take pictures in the street, the general attitude towards cameras in Saudi is not very positive (and being shouted at in the street by a woman whose face you cannot see at all is quite a strange experience).

In response to what you have said Jo, I think that you are right as documentary photographers, we are trying to 'reveal' something. It doesn't have to be anything controversial but the point of the work is to share something that we have seen. Some people do go quite far and show their subjects in a controversial way, and that is subjective and up to the decision of the photographer. But what i am talking about here is a different issue, I think. It is not about showing people in a negative light so much as forcing them to share something that they have not offered to share. This I think is not up to the decision of the photographer, it is not fair to go in as a woman where men are forbidden, take pictures and then share them with men, especially when some of these women may have not revealed their faces to men for their entire adult life.

That feeling, the fear of being seen by a man, is something that is so difficult to understand when you come from a different culture, but I think it is important to respect it. One of the women I met has a piece of paper taped over the little camera in the top of her laptop because she is afraid that when she goes on the internet men can get into her computer and take pictures of her through it. When I asked if I could photograph it, she double-checked 'you're sure you can't see my refection in the screen?'. I was also approached in the street at some point and asked for my picture, which I agreed to, but the girl I was with was horrified. 'Don't do that, you don't know what they'll do with it. You know, bluetooth...'

So no I didn't totally understand everything in Saudi but I definitely found it fascinating to try, and I did my best to get my head round this concept of privacy that dominates women's lives over there.

Comment posted by Olivia Arthur on April 16, 2009

Dear Olivia Arthur,
I am sure you must know this already, but your comments about the gender issue which is so powerful in the country you are exploring remind me of what Eve Arnold said about taking pictures in the Gulf countries. She was allowed to take pictures during a Saudi arabian princess wedding because she was a woman. It's very interesting what she tells about her experience in one her book "In retrospect". Yet, I believe that being a woman was not an issue for Eve Arnold, and looking at your pictures I am not focused on the fact that you are a woman, but simply that you are a photographer.
Thank you for your work.
Elena Lionnet

Comment posted by Elena Lionnet on April 21, 2009

Hi Olivia,

I posted a discussion on 'long-term project dynamics' over on Lightstalkers about some of the issues I myself have been facing and the struggle to find a balance between getting close enough, but not too close to a subject. You both want great access but you also are not one of them and the difficulties sometimes of negotiation in photographing:

http://nordichigh.wordpress.com/

Comment posted by Davin Ellicson on April 23, 2009

Sorry, wrong link. Here's the post: http://www.lightstalkers.org/long-term-project-dynamics

Comment posted by Davin Ellicson on April 23, 2009