ZEKE: Spring 2018

ZEKESPRING 2018 VOL.4/NO.1 

THE MAGAZINE OF GLOBAL DOCUMENTARY 

$9.95 US/$10.95 CANADA 

FEATURED ARTICLES 

VITAL SIGNS 

CLIMATE CHANGE IN ANTARCTIC WATERS 

Photographs by Amy Martin 

DECONSTRUCTING POWER 

FACES OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE 

Photographs by Diana Zeyned Alhindawi, 

Jean Chung, Anica James, Heba Khamis 

WOMEN WORK 

Photographs by Casey Atkins, Delphine Blast, 

Joan Lobis Brown, Vidhyaa Chandramohan, 

Susan Kessler, Valerie Leonard, 

Maranie Staab, Beata Wolniewicz 

the women’s issue 

Published 1 / ZEKE by SPRING Social Documentary 2018 Network

SPRING 2018 VOL.4/NO.1 

$9.95 US/$10.95 CANADA 

the women’s issue 

A special issue featuring the work of women 

photographers and writers. 

“If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure 

of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine?” 

—Mary Beard 

2 | VITAL SIGNS 



Text by Anne Sahler 

Amy Martin 

Heba Khamis 

16 | DECONSTRUCTING POWER 


Photographs by Diana Zeyned Alhindawi, Jean Chung, 

Anica James, Heba Khamis 

Text by Ladan Osman 

36 | WOMEN WORK 

Photographs by Casey Atkins, Delphine Blast, Joan Lobis Brown, 

Vidhyaa Chandramohan, Susan Kessler, Valerie Leonard, 

Maranie Staab, Beata Wolniewicz 

Text by Ezinne Ukoha 

Maranie Staab 

Aida Muluneh 

32 | 

34 | 

56 | 

60 | 

65 | 

Award Winners 

Interview with Aida Muluneh 

by Caterina Clerici 

Through a Woman’s Lens 

by J. Sybylla Smith 

Book Reviews 

Women on Fire 

Trending Women Photographers 

on SDN 

The Women’s Issue cover image is 

by Dutch photojournalist Marinka 

Masséus from her SDN exhibit, My 

Stealthy Freedom-Iran, addressing 

women’s responses to forced wearing 

of hijab. With the windows of her 

Tehran apartment covered with tinfoil 

to ensure that the flash would not be 

visible from outside, the women threw 

their brightly colored headscarves in the 

air. As it floated back to them, Masséus 

captured their acts of defiance.

ZEKE 

THE 

MAGAZINE OF 

GLOBAL DOCUMENTARY 

Published by Social Documentary Network 

From the Guest Editor: 

My first thought when asked to be Guest Editor of 

the Women’s Issue was to create a diverse and 

inclusive voice by harnessing a collective of women 

photojournalists from as wide a geographic expanse 

as possible. Working with an amazing jury of women 

photojournalists, educators, and editors for our Call for Entries, we 

selected five of the photo essays featured in this issue. As always, in 

a jurying process, individual choice is blended and a consensus is 

reached. I thoroughly appreciate the thoughtful consideration of my 

colleagues and the opportunity to work together. 

My next challenge was to arrive at two overriding themes for the 

issue. Tragically, sexual violence was a repeated narrative with exhibits 

examining violence against women in war zones, in prostitution and 

at home. I was awed by the courageous resilience of these women 

and appreciate all who work to expose and ameliorate this abuse of 

power. I was moved to contact and include an image by Canadian 

photojournalist, Anica James, whose self-portrait is on page 24. She is 

in recovery from a premeditated sexual assault by a male peer while 

on assignment in Nepal. She received zero support when she reported 

the incident to the Associated Press, where her assailant freelanced. 

Her courageous and healing photo essay, After/Shock, can be viewed 

on SDN. 

Another theme with stories from several continents was the innovation 

and entrepreneurship of women at work. Despite dire working 

conditions and competing roles as the primary parent or caregiver, 

women persist and provide for their families while impacting every 

national economy, worldwide. 

I was intent on creating an international perspective when choosing 

books to review and sourcing writers for the reviews and feature 

articles. This led me to collaborate with a diverse group of women 

whose powerful voices are eager to offer interpretation and analysis. 

My research and writing on the history and current status of women 

photojournalists were a deep dive into our rich and overlooked history. 

Interviewing contemporary curators, academics and photographers was 

enriching and empowering. Expect to hear more from me on this topic. 

Thank you for the privilege to amplify these stories captured with 

breathtaking intimacy, eloquence and compassion. I hope you feel their 

urgency and conviction to ignite positive change by revealing issues 

that are both hidden and those which persist in plain sight. Our shared 

witness yields a greater truth. 

J. Sybylla Smith 

From the Executive Editor: 

The idea to publish an all-women issue of ZEKE first 

surfaced last year when the #MeToo Movement was 

getting underway in earnest. We were exploring 

themes for the fall 2017 issue when members of 

the SDN Advisory Committee suggested doing a 

women’s issue. Everyone immediately agreed it was 

the right idea at the right time. We wanted to take 

a bold stand and acknowledge women for their 

contributions to the field of documentary and we 

agreed to devote an entire issue of ZEKE to women 

photographers and writers. Here it is! 

I cannot say enough what an extraordinary 

privilege it has been to work with J. Sybylla Smith 

and all the photographers, writers, jurors, and 

volunteer staff to create this Women’s Issue of ZEKE. 

One of the ground rules was that while all the 

photographers must be women, the themes explored 

could be anything. But the fact is that most of the 

work that came in, and two of the three themes in this 

issue, are women-centric. The take-away for me is 

that not only is there extraordinary work being done 

by women (it doesn’t take me to tell you that), but 

there is extraordinary and important work by women 

about women. We are thrilled to be able to present 

both in this issue. 

I want to thank all of the women who have lent 

their insight, skills, creativity, and dedication to bring 

this issue to fruition. One person in particular, who 

only has a tiny credit in the volunteer staff list but 

deserves a bold-faced headline, is Barbara Ayotte— 

both my life-partner and partner with SDN and ZEKE 

magazine. You can rest assured that she has read 

every article and every word in every issue of ZEKE 

at least three times to make sure we are on message 

and typo-free. And I also want to make a shout-out 

to our Advisory Committee and Campaign for ZEKE 

supporters who make this and every issue of ZEKE 

possible. 

Glenn Ruga 

ZEKE SPRING 2018/ 1

VITAL SIGNS 



2 / ZEKE SPRING 2018

As a documentary photographer, 

Arizona-based Amy Martin uses her 

camera’s lens to increase awareness, 

understanding and compassion 

across physical and social 

barriers. Before concentrating on 

photography, Amy spent years working in 

international development and relief, including 

more than two years in the Dominican 

Republic working on environmental health 

and women’s health and empowerment. In 

Guatemala, she worked with indigenous midwives, 

and in Haiti on medical relief following 

the devastating 2010 earthquake. She 

has explored the issues of statelessness of 

Latino farm workers on the Arizona/Mexico 

border and the long-term effects of uranium 

mining on indigenous people and lands. 

Martin currently works as a photographer 

for the Mariposa Foundation that helps 

to educate and empower adolescent girls 

living in extreme poverty in the Dominican 

Republic and also teaches “Identity Through 

Photography” workshops to children from 

marginalized communities. Martin is the winner 

of ZEKE’s recent Call for Entries, Through 

a Woman’s Lens. In her winning series 

shown here, “Vital Signs: Climate Change in 

Antarctic Waters,” she poetically captures the 

haunting beauty of the ice in every stage of 

decomposition as a warning and reminder of 

the ominous shifting in the vital signs of the 

planet due to human-driven climate change. 

“... Photography can impassion a wide audience 

of people by sharing the hidden story 

behind issues that I advocate — be it health, 

the environment, gender equality, or social 

justice. Through the dark and contemplative 

mood of these images, I hope to allow an 

exploration of the emotions surrounding these 

changes, acknowledge their imminent effects 

on humanity and, thus, provide motivation for 

action,” concludes Martin. 

—Anne Sahler 

Formerly a glacier, this large 

iceberg decomposes gradually 

off the Antarctic Peninsula. 

Photo by Amy Martin. 


A calving glacier loses ice to the 

ocean in the Lemaire Channel off the 

western Antarctic Peninsula. 




A calving glacier loses ice to the 

ocean in the Lemaire Channel off the 

western Antarctic Peninsula. 




Icebergs and segmented sea-ice 

break apart in the warming waters 

off of the Antarctic Peninsula. 




Gentoo penguins escape predators on 

an iceberg off the Antarctic Peninsula. 




The melting of large icebergs, such 

as this, is altering global sea-levels 

and water chemistry in the Antarctic 

Peninsula. 




Displaced pastoralists settled near the capital 

of Somaliland after having lost their livestock 

and livelihood after recent droughts. Photo 

by David Verberckt from Waiting for the Rain 

on SDN. 

FIRE 

STORM 

& ICE 

by Anne Sahler 

THE IMPACTS OF 

CLIMATE CHANGE ON 

NATURE AND SOCIETY 

Severe floods and 

wildfires in California, 

hurricanes in Florida 

and Houston, winter 

storms, tornadoes, 

heavy downpours, 

extreme heat and 

cold, and tropical cyclones 

have left many people dead 

and homeless. Extreme 

weather and climate events in 

the United States and around 

the globe have significantly 

increased in recent decades, 

affecting our planet’s ecosystems 

and the health of societies 

around the world. 

A human-made threat 

In March 2018, weather data 

revealed that the Arctic had 

experienced its warmest winter 

ever in February with a rise 

in temperatures more than 

45 degrees above normal. 

Since 1980, these high winter 

temperatures have become 

more frequent, more intense, 

and longer-lasting. What is the 

reason behind the alarming 

record-breaking temperatures 

in the Arctic Sea? The disappearance 

of sea ice. Arctic 

sea ice is declining at a rate 

of 13.2 percent per decade, 

relative to the 1981–2010 

average. 2017 was at least the 

third warmest year recorded 

of the earth’s land and oceans 

since record keeping began in 

1880 as well as the warmest 

year on record for the global 

oceans according to research 

conducted by NASA and 

the World Meteorological 

Organization. 

Thanks to modern technology 

like earth-orbiting satellites 

and other technological 

advances, most climate scientists 

agree with a probability 

of greater than 95 percent 

that the increased levels of 

greenhouse gases since the 

mid-20th century due to human 

activity are the main cause 

of the current warming trend. 

Given the fact that greenhouse 

gas emission reduction plays a 

significant role in the threat of 

climate change, 195 countries 

have signed the Paris Climate 

Agreement within the United 

Nations Framework Convention 

on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 

Adopted in December 2015 

and in force since November 

2016, the agreement aims to 

limit the rise in global temperatures 

to below 3.6 degrees 

Fahrenheit by the end of the 

century and to pursue efforts to 

limit the temperature increase 

even further to 34.7 degrees 

Fahrenheit. While former US 

President Barack Obama committed 

to lowering emissions by 

26–28 percent below 2005 

levels by 2025 and transferred 

$US 1 billion to the United 

Nations Green Climate Fund, 

current US President Donald 

Trump has pulled the US out of 

the Paris Climate Agreement for 

economic reasons, claiming the 

agreement was too costly for the 

American people, leaving other 

signatory countries bewildered. 


The global effects of 

climate change 

It is difficult to predict the longlasting 

consequences but there 

are certain effects that are likely 

to occur: The earth will become 

warmer, which will result in 

more evaporation and precipitation; 

increased carbon dioxide 

and other man-made emissions 

in the atmosphere will create 

a stronger greenhouse effect; 

oceans will become warmer; 

and glaciers and other ice will 

Already, climate change is 

having a measurable impact 

on human health, including 

malnutrition due to a decline in 

global wheat and rice yields, 

and the impact of extreme 

natural disasters forces some 

26 million people into poverty 

each year. 

partially melt, which will result 

in an increase of sea levels. But 

climate change has a significant 

impact not only on nature, but 

also on society. Most notably it 

increases volatility and threatens 

societal efforts to end poverty. 

Already, climate change is 

having a measurable impact 

on human health, including 

malnutrition due to a decline in 

global wheat and rice yields, 

and the impact of extreme 

natural disasters forces some 26 

million people into poverty each 

year. The World Bank stated 

that by 2030, the impact of 

climate change could push an 

additional 100 million people 

into poverty if no urgent action 

is taken. 

Low-lying deltas in Asia as 

well as small island nations 

and coastal communities in the 

Arctic are considered “hotspots 

of societal vulnerability [...] and 

are most certain to be impacted 

by climate change,” Virginia 

Burkett, Chief Scientist for 

Climate and Land Use Change 

at the United States Geological 

Survey, points out. She also 

stresses: “The drivers of climate 

change and the impacts are all 

associated with human-induced 

warming but vary from one 

region to another. In the US, 

the temperature of the coldest 

winter days increased by 

4.78 degrees Fahrenheit in the 

Pacific Northwest compared 

to 1901–1960. Snowpack 

is decreasing in the western 

mountain region, affecting 

spring runoff available for crops 

and communities and directly 

affecting the ski industry. Those 

living in coastal Alaska are 

being affected by the collapse 

of permafrost coupled with the 

loss of sea ice and the accelerated 

rise in mean sea level.” 

The arid Southwest of the US 

is also affected by the effects of 

climate change. Here, climate 

change has increased the intensity 

of heat waves and drought 

events as seen by the wildfires 

Smoke haze from Diego Fire, Los Alamos, New Mexico. Scientists studied the impact of carbonaceous 

“tar balls” in the wildfire’s smoke determining that these particles contribute to the 

warming effects of climate change more than previously thought. Photo by Carolyn Monsastra 

from The Witness Tree on SDN. 

Climate change is causing serious damage to communities across New England, with the 

rise of sea levels and storm surges strong enough to drown out major metropolises. Photo by 

Lauren Owens Lambert from Along the Water’s Edge on SDN. 

in California last summer that 

had an economic toll estimated 

at $US 18 billion. The warming 

climate is also considered to be 

the primary cause for wildfires 

in Alaska, causing some native 

Alaskan communities to leave 

their homes behind and move 

inland, away from the coast. 

The author of the 2007 Nobel 

Prize-winning report of the 

U.N. Intergovernmental Panel 

on Climate Change’s fourth 

assessment report summarizes 

the most prominent effects of 

climate change in the US by 

pointing to Louisiana, where 

“the sea level rise is contributing 

to the loss of wetlands, coastal 

forests and barrier islands 

that protect coastal communities 

from storm surge.” And in 

the Norfolk-Hampton Roads 

area in Virginia, as well as 

the US Pacific Islands, “lowlying 

coastal communities are 

experiencing chronic ‘nuisance 

flooding’ associated with sea 

level rise.” 

Looking at all the social and 

economic effects, adaptation 

strategies regarding climate 

change are essential parts of a 

community’s response to climate 

change. Several new organizations 

and public websites such 

as the US Climate Resilience 

Toolkit allow communities to 

share climate change adaptation 

strategies, successes and 

failures. 

Action needed now 

Urgent action is required to 

limit the effects of near-term 

climate change and long-term 

global warming as is the need 

for rapid and radical measures 

to cut greenhouse emissions. 

The worst case scenario, 

according to Burkett, would be 

an “abrupt climate change. A 

large-scale change in the climate 

system that takes place in 

just a few decades or less, that 

persists and causes substantial 

disruptions to human systems 

and natural ecosystems.” 

FOR MORE INFORMATION 

NASA 

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ 

Climate Science Special Report 

https://bit.ly/2h2NEX1 

Climate News Network 

https://bit.ly/2rmzuI9 

National Climate Assessment 

https://bit.ly/2GCYUI4 

National Oceanic and 

Atmospheric Administration 

http://www.noaa.gov 

The World Bank 

https://bit.ly/1eDvENm 

Intergovernmental Panel on 

Climate Change 

https://bit.ly/22cshAA 

US Climate Resilience Toolkit 

https://toolkit.climate.gov/ 

United Nations Framework 

Convention on Climate Change 

http://unfccc.int/2860.php 


DECONSTRUCTING 


Photographs by: 

Diana Zeyneb 

Alhindawi 

Jean Chung 

Anica James 

Heba Khamis 

Photograph by Jean Chung 

Tuombe, 18, at Keshero Hospital 

in Goma, North Kivu province, 

Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Tuombe said she and her 

eight-year-old sister, Odetta, 

were raped by three gunmen 

from FDLR (Democratic Forces 

for the Liberation of Rwanda) 

in September 2007 as the two 

sisters were farming potatoes. 

16 / ZEKE APRIL SPRING 2015 2018

POWER 

ZEKE ZEKE SPRING APRIL 2015/ 2018/ 17

Deconstructing Power 

Faces of Sexual Violence 

“A cosmic frontier splits the planet in 

two halves,” wrote feminist scholar 

Fatema Mernissi. “The frontier indicates 

the line of power.” When we talk about 

the powerful and powerless, we may 

consider who is acted upon, and who 

escapes accountability. 

Numerous studies indicate that victims 

of domestic, sexual, and conflict-related 

assault are targeted primarily by gender. 

According to a 2013 global report by 

the World Health Organization, 35.6% 

of women have been harmed by an 

intimate or a stranger, or both. As many 

as 38% of all murdered women are 

killed by a partner, compared to 6% of 

all murdered men. These traumas more 

than double survivors’ rates of psychological 

torment and alcohol addiction. 

With 42% of women who have been 

physically and/or sexually abused by 

a partner experiencing injuries as a 

result of that abuse, gender violence is a 

global health crisis. 

Jean Chung, a South Korean 

photographer, documents survivors of 

sexual violence and their children in 

Uganda and the Democratic Republic 

of Congo (DRC). Diana Zeyneb 

Alhindawi, from the United States, follows 

the brave witnesses testifying in the 

Minova rape trial in the DRC. Canadian 

photographer Anica James shares her 

personal experience of harassment and 

assault by one of her colleagues, and 

Egyptian storyteller Heba Khamis 

renders intimate portraits related to 

breast ironing in Cameroon. 

In these folios, women photographers 

are deconstructing power and seeking 

to interrupt descriptions of survivors 

as invisible, powerless, voiceless, or 

stripped of their inherent dignity. 

—Ladan Osman 


Photograph by Jean Chung 

Akol Harriet stands with her one-yearold 

son, Sahidi, in her home in Gulu, 

Democratic Republic of Congo. Harriet 

was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance 

Army at the age of eight in Wiiagwem 

Village in Lira District, and spent 13 

years in the bush as a girl soldier and 

a sex slave. She said her husband, a 

captain in charge, had four wives. She 

gave birth to two children in the bush 

and later had six more with a new 

husband. 



Photograph by Diana Zeyneb 

Alhindawi 

From The Minova Rape Trial 

From February 12–19, 2014, a 

temporary courtroom was set up in 

Minova town to hear the testimonies 

of resident rape survivors. On trial 

were 39 FARDC (Armed Forces of 

the DRC) soldiers, accused of participating 

in a 10-day run of violence in 

November 2012, during which more 

than 1,000 women, children and 

men were raped in Minova alone. 

In this photo, a survivor testifies 

while holding a microphone. On 

a November evening in 2012, 

Congolese government soldiers 

knocked on her door. Her five 

children scattered and hid in the 

bedroom. Her husband fled earlier 

when he heard bullets. When the soldiers 

entered the house, two of them 

threw her to the ground and began 

to rape her. The others pillaged her 

home, carrying off sacks of rice, 

corn, and cans of cooking oil. Her 

husband returned in the morning. 

When he learned she had been 

raped, he left and never returned. 


Photograph by Diana 

Zeyneb Alhindawi 

From The Minova Rape Trial 

Many victims testifying at the 

Minova Rape Trial have posttraumatic 

stress disorder. A 

woman about to testify became 

deeply afraid. Her mind had 

fixated on the events of the night 

she was raped. To calm her, a 

psychologist told her, “Do you 

know where you are now? There 

is nothing to fear here. You are 

safe. Look at this egg in front 

of you. Look at the shell that I 

peeled off. Focus on the present.” 



Photograph by Anica James 

From After/Shock 

This story on SDN is about my 

personal journey with Post-traumatic 

Stress Disorder and what it looks like 

from an internal point of view. On 

June 5, 2014 I was manipulated, 

threatened, held against my will and 

sexually assaulted by a renowned 

Nepali photojournalist in Kathmandu, 

Nepal. He was doing everything that 

he could to rape me that night, and I 

will never forget when he said: “If you 

don’t have sex with me, I will destroy 

your career.” 

This event sent me spiraling 

downwards; everything associated 

with photojournalism triggered me for 

months on end, and it nearly caused 

me to give up photography altogether. 




Photograph by Heba Khamis 

From Banned Beauty 

Mothers in Cameroon iron their 

daughters’ breasts using heated 

objects to delay maturity and 

protect them from rape and early 

marriage. 

In this photo, Noopiote-Justine is 

massaging her 11-year-old daughter’s 

breasts with a warm stone. 

Cameroonians do breast ironing 

secretly at home, feeling ashamed 

that their daughters have breasts. 



Photograph by Heba Khamis 

From Banned Beauty 

Suzanne, 11 years old, began 

experiencing breast ironing a few 

months before this image was 

taken. 


DRC. A veiled rape survivor testified in court behind a curtain to further shield her 

from the eyes of those she accused. Special care is taken to provide rape survivors 

with disguises, curtains, veils, whatever they may need to feel secure when giving their 

testimony. The women are referred to by numbers instead of by name to maintain their 

anonymity. Photograph by Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi from The Minova Rape 

Trial on SDN. 

A VALLEY 

OF ECHOES 

THE GLOBAL PREVALENCE 

OF GENDER VIOLENCE 

Gender-based violence is widespread, 

the statistics staggering regardless of the 

victim’s age, economic status, or nationality. 

by Ladan Osman 

In scriptures, poetry, 

constitutions, and leaders’ 

pledges to protect 

all members of the state, 

women are often listed with 

children, or others rendered 

“vulnerable” by circumstance. 

The woman citizen is imagined 

as less adult. Is it possible 

that vocabularies that consider 

women as objects make a 

quiet argument that the assault 

on our person is inevitable? 

Gender-based violence is 

widespread, the statistics 

staggering regardless of the 

victim’s age, economic status, 

or nationality. 

In conflict-challenged 

regions, women and children 

are especially susceptible to 

attack by assailants who in 

part consider their bodies part 

of a territory to conquer. There 

remains a lack of reliable data 

on violence experienced by 

a non-partner, and violence 

in conflict-affected settings. 

“When we think of war, we 

think of it as something that 

happens to men in fields or 

jungles,” writes Eve Ensler, 

artist and founder of V-Day, a 

movement to end gender violence. 

“But after the bombing, 

after the snipers, that’s when 

the real war begins.” 

A Siege on Civilians: 

the Aftermath of 

Minova 

For ten days in November 

2012, soldiers in the 

Congolese army seized the 

market town of Minova. In 

a sequence of attacks that 

seemed determined to raze the 

morale of ordinary citizens, at 

least seventy-six women and 

girls were raped. It should 

be noted that other reports 

estimate hundreds of assaults 

during those ten days. The 

findings in a 2013 report by 

the UN Joint Human Rights 

Office (UNJHRO) indicate that 

“rape is used as a weapon of 

war to intimidate local communities, 

and to punish civilians 

for their real or perceived collaboration 

with armed groups 

or the national army.” Most of 

these rapes were committed 

“during attacks aimed at gaining 

control of territories rich 

in natural resources.” There 

are devastating metaphorical 

links between women and 

properties, solidified by social 

practices around the world. 

The mythology of the fertile 

woman becomes tangled with 

invasions of verdant land. 

Following domestic and 

international outcry, and a 

demand to apply the government’s 

zero tolerance policy 

towards these crimes, fourteen 

officers and twenty-five 

rank-and-file soldiers of the 

Congolese army were put 

on trial in Goma, the largest 

rape trial in the nation’s 

history. Seventy-five survivors 

gave testimony, veiled by 

curtains or clothing to protect 

their identities. The verdict 

was given by a local military 

court: while thirty-nine were 

accused, only two low-ranking 

soldiers were convicted, each 

for one assault. Since Minova, 

there have been incremental 

improvements in the carriage 

of justice. According 

to the UNJHRO report, there 

were “187 convictions by 

military jurisdictions for sexual 

violence between July 2011 

and December 2013, with 

sentences ranging from 10 

months to 20 years of imprisonment.” 

When President 

Joseph Kabila addressed 

parliament on October 23, 

2013, he vowed to make the 

Democratic Republic of Congo 

“an inhospitable land for the 

perpetrators of these heinous 

crimes.” On December 12, 

2013, President Kabila signed 


“The perpetrators thought 

that they were untouchable, 

that nothing would happen to 

them. The tipping point that 

we are now talking about is 

the change of that culture.” 

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka 

Executive Director of UN Women 

an accord in Nairobi, refusing 

amnesty for war crimes 

committed by rebel soldiers. 

The protocols launched in 

2014 were revised in 2017. 

Although faced with local 

instabilities and waning international 

support, organizers 

and survivors in the DRC continue 

to lead the fight towards 

justice and healing. “People 

think that, after being raped, 

you are just a victim...life goes 

on after rape. Rape is not the 

end. It is not a fixed identity,” 

said Jeanna Mukuninwa, 

aged 28, from the Democratic 

Republic of Congo. 

Painful Protections 

In 2014, Julie Ada Tchoukou 

published one of the most 

comprehensive studies on 

breast ironing in Cameroon, a 

mutilating practice “whereby 

a young girl’s developing 

breasts are pounded, pressed 

Cameroon. Kenmeni is bandaging her daughter’s breasts after ironing them for her. She 

believes that she needs to grow up and have a strong body first before having breasts. 

Photograph by Heba Khamis from Banned Beauty on SDN. 

Russia. Larissa, 38, waiting for an ambulance because her husband broke her nose. She opposed 

the arrest of her husband. Most women call police only to scare their husbands for a 

few hours and then withdraw their complaints. Photograph by Anastasia Rudenko from 

Domestic Violence on SDN. 

or massaged with an object 

usually heated in a wooden 

fire, to make them stop 

developing, grow more slowly 

or disappear completely” 

in order to protect her from 

sexual knowledge and attack. 

The much-cited 2006 report 

published by German Society 

for International Cooperation 

(GIZ) (but no longer online) 

found that “25% of all girls 

and women had experienced 

some form of breast ironing in 

their lives, although the prevalence 

rates differ depending 

on location.” Lasting effects 

include cysts, mastitis, disfiguration, 

inability to breastfeed, 

and depression. Tragically, 

the very act meant to prepare 

a girl for sexual engagement 

within acceptable parameters 

may leave her less emotionally 

and physically capable of 

enjoying the pleasures of womanhood. 

Chi Yvonne Leina, 

founder of Gender Danger (a 

grassroots organization aimed 

at ending breast ironing), 

relates a particularly disturbing 

account of a woman named 

Geneva Ikome who ironed her 

own breasts in primary school, 

calling herself “a victim of 

breast ironing, and a perpetrator, 

too.” 

Tchoukou notes the use 

of the grinding stone, inferring 

that guardian women in 

Cameroon “believe that the 

preferred tool used in breast 

flattening can reconstruct 

breast tissue in the same way 

it transforms spices.” Absurdly, 

in Vice’s coverage of this practice 

in 2015, the magazine 

mentions Gildas Paré (who 

made portraits of survivors 

and breast ironing implements) 

was a former food photographer. 

It’s worth stating the 

difficulty in tracing studies 

and their methodologies, 

and too-often ethnographic 

approaches to documenting 

this traumatic practice. In 

recent years, western attention 

on breast ironing increased 

when the British Parliament 

attempted to address the issue 

within its population. Another 

factor affecting statistics and 

narrative framing of breast 

ironing is a girl’s will to protect 

her female guardian. The 

assumed right to protect girls 

from violence with violence is 

one response from the defensive 

positioning many women 

take in order to stay alive. This 

vigilance may be a corrupted 

survival instinct, formed from a 

long and brutal education. 

Revising Culture 

Social expectations for girls 

and women, which emphasize 

passivity, silence, and innocence, 

place the burden of 

assault on the victim. Further, 

shallow definitions of honor 

and devoted motherhood 

are troubled by the effects of 

this abuse, which more than 

double survivors’ rates of 

psychological torment, alcohol 

addiction, and induced abortion 

as compared to women 

who haven’t suffered from this 

violence. The private spheres 

evade application of law, and 

this abuse becomes secret or 

codified as “culture.” 

“The perpetrators thought 

that they were untouchable, 

that nothing would happen 

to them,” Phumzile Mlambo- 

Ngcuka, Executive Director 

of UN Women said in her 

address in March 2018 to The 

Commission on the Status of 

Women. “The tipping point 

that we are now talking about 

is the change of that culture.” 


AWARD WINNERS 

HONORABLE MENTIONS 

FROM SDN’S CALL FOR ENTRIES ON 

THROUGH A WOMAN’S LENS 

Amber Bracken 

Standing Rock 

Standing Rock, North Dakota, 

September 2016–February 

2017. For over ten months, members 

of the Standing Rock Sioux 

tribe and their allies camped in 

opposition to the Dakota Access 

Pipeline crossing their land and 

water. The estimated $3.78 billion 

project is nearly complete, 

crossing almost 1,172 miles. 

Heba Khamis 

Banned Beauty 

Mothers in Cameroon iron their 

daughters’ breasts using heated 

cooking objects. Other tools also 

used include leaves, bananas, 

coconut, shells, grinding stones, 

ladles, spatulas and hammers 

heated over coals. Even magic 

is exercised. Mothers hope that 

flattening the breasts delays 

maturity. 

32 / ZEKE 2015 SPRING 2018

ZEKE presents these four honorable mention winners from SDN’s 

Call for Entries “Through a Woman’s Lens.” The jurors selected 

Amy Martin as the first place winner (see Vital Signs, page 3), 

and the four photographers presented here. 

Emily Schiffer 

Cheyenne River 

In 2005, I founded a 

photography program 

for young people on the 

Cheyenne River Reservation 

in South Dakota. For 

twelve years, my students 

and I have photographed 

together and are all subjects 

of each other’s work. 

Our favorite locations are 

the fields and abandoned 

buildings on the fringes. 

THROUGH A 

WOMAN’S LENS 

JURORS 

Barbara Ayotte 

Aida Muluneh 

Amy Pereira 

Molly Roberts 

J. Sybylla Smith 

Deborah Willis, Ph.D. 

Amy Yenkin 

Daniella Zalcman 

Danielle Villasana 

A Light Inside 

Tamara, the first trans woman I 

met in Lima, Peru, often told me 

she wasn’t going to live past 

30. How could she, she’d ask, 

when society treats her as less 

than human? Like a self-fulfilling 

prophecy, Tamara’s death this 

year due to HIV and tuberculosis 

shortly followed her 30th 

birthday. 

ZEKE SPRING ZEKE 2015/ 2018/ 33

Interview 

WITH AIDA MULUNEH 

by Caterina Clerici 

Born in Ethiopia, Aida studied film at 

Howard University in the US and then 

went on to work as a photojournalist 

at the Washington Post. Her work has 

been exhibited throughout the world 

and is in the permanent collections of 

the Smithsonian’s National Museum of 

African Art, Hood Museum, and the 

Museum of Biblical Art in the United 

States. Aida is the founder and director 

of the Addis Foto Fest and she continues 

to curate and develop cultural 

projects with local and international 

institutions through her company DESTA 

(Developing and Educating Society 

Through Art) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

CC: How did you get into photography? 

Was your passion for photography 

related to the fact that you lived in so 

many different places at a young age? 

Mario Epanya 

AM: I was interested in photography 

from an early age. I’ve always been 

obsessed with images. During high 

school in Canada, we had a really 

great art teacher who took a few of us 

to the darkroom. When the first prints 

came out, it was almost like a magical 

moment for me. 

As an Ethiopian and having lived in 

so many different places, people that I 

encountered always had misconceptions 

about Ethiopia. Granted, we were going 

through the famine in the 1980s, but 

that didn’t really match with the story I 

heard from my mother: Ethiopia was a far 

more complex place than the media was 

portraying it to be. So from that point on, 

I became aware of the misrepresentation 

you see in the media, and this triggered 

my life-long work. I really wanted to share 

with the world something a little bit different, 

not only about Ethiopia. I was living 

in the US and Canada, so I was always 

focusing on people of color, especially 

African-Americans and how they are 

portrayed in the media. That’s basically my 

journey to photography. 

I’ve had great mentors, most of them 

African-American photographers. Coming 

back home was basically taking that 

conversation to Ethiopia. Now I’ve been 

there 10 years and this is what I’m pushing 

forward with my work, with the festival and 

panel discussions. As Africans and people 

of color, we need to be more engaged: not 

only producing images, but also writing 

stories on who we are. 

CC: How are you trying to reclaim a 

different narrative of Africa with your 

work? 

AM: I’m really trying to present work 

that has universality in it. I cannot deny 

my roots or my heritage or my culture, 

which will come into the work, but I’m 

trying to create bridges across our common 

humanity. 

What I do is very personal work. It’s 

not something that I’m over-philosophizing 

about, but rather that I’ve either experienced 

or encountered along the way 

when I was working as a photojournalist. 

It’s about how to share the challenges in 

a different way, outside the blood, the 

beheadings and all the 

gore. I’m trying to make 

Africa digestible, meaning 

it’s a very complex place, 

it’s not so simple, and I’m 

only one person sharing 

my experiences. This is to 

share with the world — but 

also the continent and my 

people — that there is a 

different way of expressing 

a story, especially through 

photography. 

If you look at the foundation 

of body painting 

for instance, you see this 

traditional body ornamentation 

in Africa but also in 

South America, Asia, and 

the Middle East. I’m taking 

things of the past and bringing them into 

the future, but also twisting them in a way 

that I’m having a different dialogue based 

on my personal experience that I want to 

share with all. It’s about raising questions, 

I’m not here to give solutions. There are 

many things that need more questioning, in 

terms of the direction we are going; not as 

nationalities, or based on borders and colors 

of our skin, but to look at collectively. 

CC: One of the strongest influences of 

African tradition on your work seems to 

have been body painting. How did you 

get into it? 

AM: Body painting has a different play 

depending on the series and the image. 

If you notice, the models look alike but 

there is a specific structure I look for 

in the face. It’s a way to remove race 

and gender; I’m trying to have a very 

specific message. The photos are also 

all women. Somebody asked me why I 

don’t pick men and that’s because I’m a 

woman telling the female story. 

When I was at Howard University 

there was a fashion show and they had 

asked for an image to promote it. I picked 

two models that were going to be on the 

runway and I was really trying to show my 

African roots in my photography — you 

know, the challenge of duality is that you 

never fit anywhere — so I thought: “Let 

me paint the models and put these white 

dots!” The picture never got picked for 

the fashion show, but that was the beginning 

for me. I was shooting analogue at 

the time, I did three pieces and kept the 

images for myself. Then a few years later, 

I was selected for an exhibition at the 

Photo by Aida Muluneh. “Strength in Honor” - The World is 9 Collection/ 2016 


Photo by Aida Muluneh. “Woman and the rain, Gondor/Ethiopia” 2009 

Smithsonian’s National Museum of African 

Art, a show titled “Ethiopian Passages.” It 

was the first time I exhibited that work and 

it became part of the permanent collection. 

After that I didn’t do any body painting 

for a while. I was in the middle of my 

journalistic work and immersing myself in 

documentary filmmaking. Many years later 

Simone Njami asked me to create a body 

of work for the Divine Comedy exhibition. I 

was trying to figure out if I should go back 

to my black and white, or do something 

completely different, or go back and 

explore body painting after ten years. I did 

that and was very insecure about the work, 

because I thought people didn’t expect that 

from me, but the reaction was amazing. 

After that, I started researching body painting 

globally and started seeing patterns, 

and I’ve been doing it since. 

CC: You left Ethiopia a long time ago; 

in an interview, you said you moved 

back “with humility” and have felt like a 

foreigner in your own homeland. How 

do you come to terms with these two 

sides of your identity, and how does that 

affect your work? 

AM: I left when I was five, lived in 

Yemen, Cyprus, England, all these different 

places. The only common thread was 

my mother’s insistence never to forget the 

homeland. I think the greatest gift that 

she gave me was that we couldn’t speak 

English in the house. Going back (to 

Ethiopia), the big advantage that I had 

was I could speak the language: I had a 

better chance to learn and fit into society. 

Ethiopia really inspired me: I would not 

have been producing the same work that 

I do now if I didn’t live back home. There 

are so many textures that you don’t see 

anywhere else, for me this became a motivation 

to create this work. A lot of images 

I produce actually have a coding, patterns 

or references that only Ethiopians can 

understand. I would have never learned 

this in the West. Also, the West has a way 

of hiding certain realities, while here everything 

is in your face, even difficulties, and 

you have to find ways to deal with it. There 

are many challenges, but there is also a 

lot of grace. I had to learn, as opposed to 

impose my way of thinking. 

CC: How do you think your work is helping 

change the perception of the African 

female body, in Africa and elsewhere? 

AM: If you look at archival photos 

from Ethiopia at the turn of the century 

by European dudes who showed up to 

take photos of exotic Ethiopians, there 

is a lot of cultural misrepresentation, 

because the focus was making things 

exotic. They would take a photo of a 

woman with exposed breasts, but as 

an Ethiopian when you look at that, the 

cultural references don’t make sense 

— we know that that’s not the way a 

woman would be dressed in that region. 

Exoticising women’s bodies was a trend: 

with white women in Europe it would be 

considered pornography, but with black 

bodies it was accepted, it looked like 

an ethnological approach. The poses of 

women are very specific, and to me it’s 

more to emulate strength and pride of 

women as opposed to the vanity side. 

We are in an extremely conservative 

society here. I don’t think anyone is yet 

thinking about the use of women’s bodies 

in my work. The first conversation is the 

face painting, then the colors and then 

the composition. It penetrates in different 

segments — from the government’s TV 

program to local hotels who have stolen 

my work to promote tourism in Ethiopia. So 

if it reaches that wide of an audience, it’s 

fascinating. How do I make an impact on 

the everyday person? That’s what matters: 

not teaching photographers, but teaching 

everyone else what the role of photography 

is in society. You have to educate 

before you can even get to the tougher 

conversations about how you document 

and what stories go out. 

CC: How did the idea for the Addis Foto 

Fest come up and what is the aim? 

AM: I arrived in Addis in 2007, after 

the Bamako Biennale, which was eyeopening: 

I had spent most of my life 

thinking that I was alone in my quest for 

changing the image of the continent. 

Meeting all these photographers from 

all over Africa and the world in Bamako 

and having this conversation with them 

was really inspirational. 

I had been thinking about the festival 

as a way to connect photographers in 

Africa and the diaspora, because I saw 

that the conversation they were having in 

Africa and among African-Americans in 

the US was a similar one: it was about 

misrepresentation. They had just never 

met in one space to have this conversation 

together. When we started in 2010 

that was the concept: have a global 

interaction to shift the conversation. We 

wanted to create the space and give 

them a different idea of Africa, so they 

could take it back to their own communities. 

Unless you’re on the ground, you 

won’t understand the fuller image. 

CC: Is there a growing space for women 

photographers in Africa? 

AM: I’ve been seeing a rising number 

of female documentary photographers, 

especially thanks to the festival, but we 

need to push more for the female voice. 

I was on the jury of the World Press 

Photo and you know, 83,000 submissions 

and only 15% are women. This is 

Continued on page 62. 


WOMEN WORK 

Photographs by 

Casey Atkins 

Delphine Blast 

Joan Lobis Brown 

Vidhyaa Chandramohan 

Susan Kessler 

Valerie Leonard 

Maranie Staab 

Beata Wolniewicz 

Photograph by Joan Lobis Brown 

From Women of an UNcertain 

Age: Indomitable Baby Boomers 

Challenging Cultural Norms 

“I had my first son when I was in high 

school. I went to nursing school and 

graduate school to become a family nurse 

practitioner. I worked 100 hours a week 

to buy the equipment for my own practice 

while I raised three kids. I have seen over 

7,000 patients and I have 3,500 active 

patients. I eventually became depressed 

and gained a lot of weight. I joined the 

Black Girls Run club. Then I joined two 

half-marathon clubs. These running clubs 

transformed my life. I see how everyone 

struggles.” —Adrienne 



Photograph by Vidhyaa 

Chandramohan 

From Transnational Mothers: 

Mothering from afar in UAE 

Felina Laspuna, from the Philippines, 

is a mother of four children and has 

worked as a tailor in Abu Dhabi for 

more than 14 years. 

She burst into tears when she 

started to talk about her family. 

“I struggle and am away from them 

to provide for their education and a 

standard of living.” Felina remembered 

the voice of her younger 

daughter pleading with her to stay 

and the image of her daughter 

waving goodbye. 


Women Work 

According to UN Women, nowhere in the world 

has women’s participation in the labor force 

reached parity with men. While women are 

increasingly well-educated, labor markets still channel 

them disproportionately into work considered 

traditionally acceptable for women. Too few reach 

upper-level positions in management and leadership. 

According to the International Labor Office, 

women earn 77 percent of what men earn. These 

gaps are linked to the undervaluation of the work 

that women undertake and the need for women to 

take career breaks to attend to unpaid childcare 

and household family responsibilities. 

Around the world, women are resilient, dedicated, 

and putting in a hard day’s work. Adrienne, 

in Joan Lobis Brown’s exhibit “Women of an 

UNcertain Age” worked 100 hours a week as 

a nurse practitioner to buy the equipment for her 

practice while she raised three kids. In “Women 

of the Congo: Farmers, Harvesters, Mothers,” photographer 

Maranie Staab highlights the strength 

and grace of Congolese female farmers. Despite 

their demanding activities, women who work the 

fields are still considered the inferior sex yet they 

continue to move ahead with quiet determination 

to positively impact their future. 

In “Women’s Worth” by Casey Atkins, 

Nicaraguan women challenge the male-dominated 

economy by owning their own businesses. Women 

thrive through food production, an industry which 

allows for flexible hours and the ability to work 

from home. This convenience of home-based ventures 

gives low-income women the opportunity to 

provide for their families. 

Photojournalist Beata Wolniewicz, in her 

exhibit, “Tough Life, Strong Women,” captures the 

labor of women in Ghana, subject to difficult and 

often times dangerous conditions in the production 

of cocoa oil. Despite challenges these women find 

joy and gracefully accept their responsibilities. 

For a dollar a day, women break coal from 

the mines in the State of Jharkhand, in northeast 

India. Valerie Leonard’s exhibit “Black Hell” 

depicts the toxic environment as women sacrifice 

their lives for economic development. Around the 

world, women are migrating to seek work and 

better lives. In “Transnational Mothers,” Vidhyaa 

Chandramohan captures the challenges migrant 

workers encounter while working in a foreign land, 

far from their children. 

—Ezinne Ukoha 



Photograph by Vidhyaa 

Chandramohan 

From Transnational Mothers: 

Mothering from afar in UAE 

Satya, from Visakapatinam, India, 

has three children and now works as 

a cleaner after the death of her husband. 

Satya left behind her children 

to her elderly parents and moved to 

the UAE to support her family. She 

earns $220 a month, where she has 

to support herself and send a portion 

of her earnings to her mother and 

children back home. Satya shared 

that she has not seen her children 

for more than three years, “I can go 

back anytime, but I know that If I go 

back, no one eats.” 



Photograph by Delphine Blast 

From Cholitas, the Revenge of 

a Generation 

Maritza Lizarraga works at the 

administrative department of the 

Bolivian Special Forces, La Paz, 

Bolivia, 2017. 

The iconic bowler hat, the long 

black braids, the adjusted corset, 

and the brightly colored puffed skirt: 

their outfit is well-known all around 

the world. The mythical cholitas are 

a strong symbol of Bolivia. Yet for 

decades, they have suffered racial 

and social discrimination. The term 

“cholita” pointed to the poor country 

girl, deprived of her rights. 

But gradually, things are changing 

and today the trend is more than 

reversed: in 2017 cholitas are on the 

front of the stage. 


Photograph by Beata Wolniewicz 

From Tough Life, Strong Women 

I took pictures of these women in Ghana 

who were working to make cocoa oil. I 

observed that all the labor was done by 

hand, and was very difficult to do. The 

women worked under quite dangerous 

conditions. Ghana is a very poor country 

and the economy is still very much 

agriculturally based. 




Photograph by Valerie 

Leonard 

From Black Hell 

In the State of Jharkhand, in 

northeast India, the Damodar 

Valley became a hell on earth. The 

open-cast coal mines took over 

the forest. These mines have been 

active without interruption for over a 

century. The extraction of the “black 

diamond” destroyed the fauna and 

flora, and upset the topography. 

In the suffocating hostility of this 

environment, desperate people 

sacrifice their lives for the economic 

development of India. They work 

and survive despite many diseases 

caused by the toxic atmosphere. 

The lucky ones are employed 

by mining companies. For a dollar 

a day, men and women break 

the coal that they carry in wicker 

baskets on their heads to load onto 

waiting trucks. But the majority of 

them, by thousands, before dawn, 

illegally collect coal to sell on the 

black market. 


Photograph by Casey Atkins 

From Women’s Worth 

Maria Vallejos Mejia makes pastries 

in her kitchen in northern Nicaragua. 

In the male-dominated society of 

Nicaragua, it can be difficult for a 

woman to advance on her own. Many 

low-income women have taken to 

starting their own businesses in the 

informal economy as a means of gaining 

some autonomy. The majority of 

these businesses revolve around food 

production. Women often produce their 

goods in their homes and sell them in 

local markets or right from their front 

doorstep. These types of businesses 

have given many low-income women 

the opportunity to thrive and provide 

for their families. 




Photograph by Maranie Staab 

From Women of the Congo: 

Farmers, Harvesters, Mothers 

Agricultural cooperatives are often the 

spark that will stimulate a community’s 

economy. Asili, a social enterprise initiative 

of the American Refugee Committee, 

is working to help create that spark, 

supporting women and men alike. Asili 

provides local farmers with the resources, 

tools, and training they need to become 

successful and profitable farmers. Given 

a loan in the form of seeds and fertilizer 

and provided a guaranteed market to sell 

their crops, farmers are able to increase 

their income, empowering them to have 

increased autonomy over their future. 


Photograph by Susan Kessler 

From Peruvian Weavers 

High in the Andes Mountains of Peru 

lies the rural village of Patacancha. 

Here the villagers dress in traditional 

clothing, speak the ancient language 

of Quechua, and live in much the 

same way as their ancestors did. They 

support themselves through farming 

and raising livestock. And, in keeping 

with tradition, the women are weavers. 

The Quechua people live a rugged, 

primitive life, with very little in the 

way of material comforts. The NGO 

Awamaki was founded with the mission 

of bettering their lives. They established 

weaving cooperatives, which allow 

the women to refine their skills and sell 

their weavings to a broader market. 

In this way, the women are helped 

financially, while still retaining their 

traditional values and ways of life. 



The 

ECONOMIC 

POWER OF 

WOMEN 

By Ezinne Ukoha 

With contributions 

by Wendy McDowell 

ing countries. According 

to an International Labour 

Organization (ILO) report 

Women at Work: Trends 

2016, other important factors 

that underscore the inequities 

at work include: a higher share 

of women in part-time employment, 

and more women than 

men underemployed against 

their wishes. 

Women are also more 

likely than men to work in the 

care economy, in jobs that are 

too often underpaid, unregulated, 

and do not offer worker 

benefits. The ILO estimates 

that over 100 million workers 

survive through the care 

key role in supporting their 

households and communities 

in achieving food and nutrition 

security, generating income, 

and improving rural livelihoods 

and overall well-being.” Yet this 

report also notes that “globally, 

and with only a few exceptions, 

rural women fare worse than 

rural men and urban women 

and men for every Millennium 

Development Goal indicator 

for which data are available.” 

This is due to lower education 

and literacy rates among rural 

women, a lack of services and 

infrastructure, and their underrepresentation 

in politics and 

decision-making groups. 

With advancements 

in technology, female 

entrepreneurs are 

discovering new 

opportunities to be 

competitive with their 

male counterparts in the 

international arena. 

Many of the world’s 

women hold dual 

roles as workers and 

as mothers/caregivers, 

but their important 

contributions to the global 

economy are downplayed and 

undervalued. Though women 

contribute to the economic 

viability of their families, 

communities, and nations, the 

stereotype persists that “breadwinner” 

men are more valuable 

members of the workforce. In 

addition to their paid work, 

women throughout the world 

engage in a remarkable range 

of unpaid housework and care 

work each day. This includes 

fetching water, preparing food, 

and caring for the young, old, 

sick, and disabled. 

When paid and unpaid 

work are combined, women 

work more than men the 

world over. This disparity is 

particularly stark in develop- 

economy, over 90 percent 

of whom are women and 

migrants. Migrant women 

are the most vulnerable, often 

subject to long hours, low 

pay, and unregulated working 

conditions, without access to 

benefits or legal protections 

that might mitigate these harsh 

realities. Migrants often remain 

dependent on their employers 

for basic amenities, living 

arrangements, and to shield 

them from deportation. 

Women are essential to 

agricultural production, especially 

in the developing world, 

but this work also tends to be 

informal, unpaid, and invisible. 

A report from Global Volunteers 

notes that “women comprise 43 

percent of the world’s agricultural 

labor force—rising to 70 

percent in some countries.” 

UN WomenWatch points out 

that “Rural women play a 

Progress Made but 

More Needed 

There has been some progress 

during the last 20 years. The 

number of women engaged in 

informal work has decreased 

(down by 17 percent); the 

amount of time women spend 

on unpaid work has narrowed 

(mostly due to a reduction in 

time spent on housework); and 

the number of women engaged 

in entrepreneurial enterprises 

has increased. A 2016/2017 

Women’s Entrepreneurship 

Report from the Global 

Entrepreneurship Monitor 

(GEM) estimates that “163 

million women are activating 

new businesses while about 11 

million are responsible for the 

operations of already established 

ventures,” and notes a 

10% increase in overall female 


TEA (total entrepreneurial 

activity) in the past two years. 

With advancements in technology, 

female entrepreneurs 

are discovering new opportunities 

to be competitive with 

their male counterparts in the 

international arena. However, 

in parts of the world crippled 

by underdevelopment, women 

still do not have the tools 

and technological capacity 

to compete. Other systemic 

problems stymie women business 

owners, including a lack 

of supportive civic organizations 

and commercial lending 

systems that tend to be biased 

against women. 

Even if female entrepreneurs 

were to be fully supported, 

this would not improve 

the lives of most women 

at work given widespread 

“occupation segregation”—in 

the US, for example, four out 

of ten women work in lower 

paying occupations where 

at least 75% of the workers 

are female. According to a 

2015 poll of more than 9,500 

women in the G20 countries, 

“work-family balance” was 

the top work-related issue for 

women (equal pay and harassment 

came in as the second 

and third respectively). 

Legislation Needed 

to End Inequality 

Governments need to tackle 

these issues of inequity head 

on by developing national 

women’s economic development 

strategies that help level 

the playing field and empower 

women workers. At the least, 

policies must be enacted to provide 

protection and recourse 

for exploited workers, requiring 

employers to engage in wage 

transparency, provide adequate 

job training, and institute 

nondiscriminatory job reviews. 

The ILO concludes that workfamily 

policies are the most 

important ingredient; they are 

“the missing link to more and 

quality jobs for women.” Thus, 

the ILO calls for the adoption 

of international labor standards 

“promoting non-discrimination, 

equal remuneration for work 

of equal value, social protection, 

maternity protection and 

support to workers with family 

responsibilities.” 

This Masai woman is gathering stalks from harvested fields in Tanzania. With the 

extra money she and her family make from the land, they will buy materials to 

expand their home. Photograph by Karen Kasmauski. 

“I started medical school when I was fifty years old. It was something I had wanted 

to do since I was four years old. At forty-eight, I went back to college to take all my 

pre-med requirements, and I got straight A’s.” Photograph by Joan Lobis Brown. 

To facilitate these changes, 

already established women’s 

trade organizations and 

unions need to be supported 

and new ones need to be 

formed. One example is 

the Self-Employed Women’s 

Association (SEWA) in India, 

a trade union which makes 

visible the typically invisible 

work of poor, self-employed 

women (94% of working 

women in India work in the 

“unorganized sector”). There 

are also effective NGO 

programs and partnerships 

that can be expanded and 

replicated, such as “Better 

Work,” a joint project of the 

ILO and the International 

Finance Corporation (IFC) to 

increase gender equality in the 

garment industry. Appointing 

more women to key economic 

positions is important, as 

well. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a 

Nigerian economist and the 

first female minister of finance 

in the region, was responsible 

for initiating programs to help 

women and children such 

as the Growing Girls and 

Women in Nigeria Programme 

(GWIN) and the Youth 

Innovation program (YouWin). 

If work opportunities and 

conditions improve for women, 

it is not only women who will 

benefit. Each country, and the 

entire global economy, will 

see growth. A 2016 McKinsey 

Global Institute study calculated 

there would be a whopping 

$12 trillion added to the 

global annual GDP in a “best 

in region” scenario “in which 

all countries match the rate of 

improvement of the fastestimproving 

country in their 

region.” In a “full potential” 

scenario in which women play 

an identical role in labor markets 

to that of men, the study 

concludes “as much as $28 

trillion, or 26 percent, could 

be added to global annual 

GDP by 2025.” 

Hopefully the challenges 

women face as workers will be 

recognized and wide-ranging 

solutions will be found. When 

women are championed, they 

contribute, create, innovate, 

and become forces of economic 

sustenance and power 

for their families, communities, 

and the world. 


through a 

woman’s 

lens By J. Sybylla Smith 

The historiography of women’s photojournalistic 

work, while still sparse, has gained 

ground in the past thirty years, due to the 

stellar and consistent work of female photographers, 

academics, museum curators, 

and editors. The fields of photojournalism 

and documentary photography reflect the 

political, social and cultural configurations 

of predominant ideologies. 

Our understanding of what is history-making and 

newsworthy has been predominately defined and 

captured through a patriarchal lens. We need to 

know and understand our own history. 

This article illustrates the myriad ways in which 

women photographers have always been in the 

picture despite historically inequitable access-—seeking 

truth, bearing witness and making invaluable 

contributions. We look back to reclaim history and 

honor the creative strategies of these women. We 

also look at innovative storytelling by contemporary 

women whose practices illustrate how seeing the 

world through a woman’s lens concurrently informs 

and transforms photojournalism and our understanding 

of the truth. 

< Female Engagement Team member and hospital corpsman 

Shannon Crowley, 22, of Swampscott, MA on patrol. 

Attached to 1st Battalion 8th Marines Bravo Company 3rd 

Platoon. Credit: Rita Leistner, Basetrack, Courtesy of Stephen 

Bulger Gallery, Afghanistan, 2011. 


Witness: A Historical View 

Women photographers have witnessed and 

chronicled our world since the camera was 

invented in the mid-19th century. Unlike other 

fine art forms, women were introduced to 

photography in tandem with men. In 1893, 

the Eastman Kodak Company targeted the 

use of their newly invented hand-held camera 

to women. Their highly successful marketing 

campaign featured the “Kodak Girl,” an 

independent camera-carrying world traveler. At 

the same time Frances Benjamin Johnston 

(1864–1952) set up her Washington D.C. 

studio and became the first woman press photographer 

in the United States. She covered the 

White House and published an article, “What a 

Woman Can Do With a Camera,” in 1897. 

Journalist Elizabeth Bisland made this observation 

in 1890: “Women with their cameras 

surpass all traditions and stand as the equals 

of men in their newly found and now more 

ardently practiced art…Indeed it seems as 

though for six thousand years women have been 

nurturing a talent to which she could give no 

expression with paint, brush or sculpture…Our 

greatest painters have been men, have we not 

a right to expect that our most famous photographers 

will be women?” This quote was featured 

on the wall of the 2015 exhibition “Who’s 

Afraid of Women Photographers? 1830–1919 

and 1918–1945” held jointly at Musee de 

L’Orangerie and Musee D’Orsay in Paris. 

“Our greatest painters have been men, have 

we not a right to expect that our most famous 

photographers will be women?” 

— Elizabeth Bisland, 1890 

The exhibition highlighted women photographers’ 

positive impact on the outcome of the 

suffrage movement while acknowledging their 

important coverage of World War I. The catalog 

states; “This was the time when they covered the 

struggle for women’s civil rights and the events 

of the Great War — a time when, through various 

forms of social commitment, the history of 

photography and the history of women joined 

forces…By the start of the First World War, the 

medium had enabled women, for the first time in 

their history, to control their public and political 

image.” 

Meanwhile, groundbreaking documentary 

work was being made in America by pioneering 

Frances Benjamin Johnston’s “New Woman,” a full-length selfportrait 

holding a cigarette in one hand and a beer stein in the 

other, in her Washington, D.C. studio. Library of Congress. 

photojournalist Alice Austen (1866–1952). 

Austen chronicled her native New York City’s 

response to the immigrant influx for a decade 

beginning in the 1890s. She photographed the 

quarantined migrants, the medical laboratories 

and the equipment used to clear immigrants for 

entry. Austen has 150 of her photos copyrighted 

with the Library of Congress, many of which 

were exhibited in Buffalo at the Pan American 

Exposition in 1901. 

Hilary Roberts, the Research Curator of 

Photography at the Britain’s Imperial War 

Museums, adds immensely to our historical 

knowledge. In A Woman’s Eye: British Women 

and Photography during the First World War, 

she introduces us to Christina Broom (1862– 

1939) and Olive Edis (1876–1955), professional 

photographers working to support their 

families in 1903. Broom was given an official 

military appointment in 1904 and is recognized 

as Britain’s first female press photographer. 

Though denied access to the battlefield, Edis 

received official permission to travel and documented 

the end of WWI in March 1919. 

Val Williams, in her book, The Other 

Observers: Women Photographers from 1900 to 

the Present, notes the significant role that women 

photographers have consistently had: “Many 

women took their cameras with them when they 


traveled abroad to become war workers, 

and the intensity of this new experience 

resulted in photographs which firmly established 

women as social documentarists.” A 

common strategy women utilized to gain 

access to the front lines was by providing 

auxiliary health services. Elsie Knocker 

(1884–1978) and Mairi Chisholm 

(1896–1981) established a medical post 

in Belgium in 1914. As amateur photographers 

they photographed their surroundings 

and those of the soldiers. Roberts 

describes their intimate portrayal of death 

and destruction as “entirely unsentimental 

documentation.” While working as a Red 

Cross nurse, Florence Farmborough 

(1887–1978) documented the trenches, 

troops and the dead soldiers on the Eastern 

Front in 1915 Russia. 

Photographers Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm outside their 

advanced dressing station, Pervyse. April 27, 1917. 

Another strategy used to enter the 

predominantly male field was to assume 

an androgynous name. Gerda Taro (nee 

Pohorylle, 1910–1937) initially submitted 

work for consideration using the spelling of 

her name backwards. Taro was instrumental 

in changing the life course of her partner, 

Endre Friedmann (Robert Capa), when 

they met as emigres in Paris in 1934. Both 

assumed pseudonyms and one went on to 

become a revered photojournalist. Author 

Jane Rogoyska details the transformation 

in Gerda Taro, Inventing Robert Capa. Her 

deep commitment to covering the Spanish 

Civil War led her to Madrid in 1936. At 

26, she became the first known woman 

photojournalist to be killed on assignment. 

It remains a matter of debate whether 

images credited to Capa were actually 

her work. 

Dickey Chapelle’s favorite photograph of herself at work, 

taken in Milwaukee in 1958 by Marine Master Sergeant Lew 

Lowery. Wisconsin Historical Images collections. 

Following in Taro’s footsteps of intrepid 

and impassioned eyewitness coverage of 

conflict was the work of American photojournalist 

Dickey Chapelle (1919– 

1965). She is noted for having defied naval 

command to gain access to the battlefield in 

World War II and is credited with capturing 

the iconic and heralded image of 

the wounded at the Battle of Iwo Jima. In 

1956, she was imprisoned while working 

in Hungary. She wrote a memoir in 1961, 

What’s A Woman Doing Here?. Shortly 

after, she dove into coverage of the Vietnam 

War. She was the first American female 

war correspondent killed reporting for the 

National Observer in 1965. 

Women photojournalists in the late 

20 th century, while still a small minority, 

were beginning to be recognized for 

their contributions. The first woman to be 

awarded the coveted World Press Photo of 

the Year Award was French photographer, 

Françoise Demulder (1947–2008), 

who won the 1st Prize Singles, Spot 

News in 1977. She covered conflict in 

Vietnam, the Middle East, Cuba, Pakistan 

and Ethiopia. Another French photojournalist, 

Catherine Leroy (1944–2006), 

was a trained parachutist and jumped in 

Operation Junction City with the 173rd 

Airborne Brigade in Vietnam in 1967. Her 

resulting image became a Life magazine 

cover and she wrote the accompanying 

feature article. 

Journalist Elizabeth Becker, author 

of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative 

History, wrote a 2017 New York Times 

article, The Women Who Covered 

Vietnam, in part as tribute to “what 

has been glossed over in the annals of 

conflict.” She and other female correspondents 

were not dispatched by “enlightened 

newsrooms” in 1960, but paid their own 

way to Saigon, including one reporter who 

entered a quiz show to earn her one-way 

fare. Becker’s article ended with a rhetorical 

question. “Did it make a difference 

having women report war? Absolutely. 

Considering our small numbers—a few 

dozen, over the course of a decade, 

spread across three countries—we had an 

outsize impact.” 

Truth: Today 

Progress toward parity is incremental. 

Legislation addressing gender equity in the 

workplace has occurred in some countries, 

however social and cultural norms lag far 

behind. Women photographers’ perseverance 

and creativity have diligently given 

voice to truth through witness. Writer and 

historian Rebecca Solnit reflects in Hope 

in the Dark: “How the transformation 

happened is rarely remembered, in part 

because it’s compromising…and it recalls 

that power comes from the shadows and 

the margins, that our hope is in the dark 

around the edges, not the limelight of 

center stage.” 

Photographer Daniella Zalcman, recognizing 

the gender disparity in photojournalism, 

created Women Photograph (www. 

womenphotograph.com) last year, a website 

that contains a database of women 

photojournalists. According to Zalcman, 

in an interview with the New York Times, 

“the issues that female photographers face 

are complex but include gender prejudice, 

hiring practices, a possible confidence 

gap between men and women, strains on 

personal lives, sexual harassment, and a 

general decline in the media industry.” 

The photojournalism field is currently 

in public discourse on gender equity following 

the announcement of the all-male 

awardees for the 2018 World Press 

Photo’s Photo of the Year award. Out of 51 

award categories, women are represented 

in only five of them. An examination of the 

constructs which perpetuate discrimination 

within the field of photojournalism needs 

further analysis. Women’s equity in this 

field calls for proactive measures to ensure 

non-discriminatory practices and protection 

from all forms of sexual violence. In 

January 2018, photographers Justin Cook 


Anjali Kumari Khang is 12 years old. “ I am not happy. I do not want to get married. 

I hope my husband gets a job in a foreign city. Then I can come back to my mother’s 

home and stay for as long as I want.” Einerwa Village, Saptari district, Nepal. Photo 

by Poulomi Basu/VII Mentor. 

and Daniel Sircar posted an open letter on 

PDN (Photo District News) signed by more 

than 410 men in the photography industry, 

calling for an end to sexual harassment, 

sexual coercion, sexual assault and 

abusive behavior in the industry, sending 

the letter to workshops, conferences, and 

leading organizations in photojournalism. 

Several professions are coming to a reckoning 

with their inherently discriminatory 

constructs. As Solnit reminds us, “We write 

history with our feet and with our presence 

and our collective voice and vision.” 

Women photojournalists have been 

rewriting the narrative of documentary 

photography in a remarkable manner 

despite the existence of sexism. Canadian 

photojournalist, Rita Leistner, believes 

women have turned a disadvantage to 

an advantage, “I’ve had the door shut 

in my face for being female.” She states 

that while exclusion continues it is in less 

overt forms. Lack of access and funding 

led Leistner to illegally walk into 

Iraq from Turkey in 2003. In Baghdad, 

without military clearance, she began 

a visual narrative of the inpatients in Al 

Rashad Psychiatric Hospital. After fighting 

surrounded the hospital, her former 

disadvantage became an advantage as 

the staff and families gave her access and 

protection. Leistner was awarded the 2017 

World Press Photo Digital Storytelling 

Award in Innovative Storytelling for To 

Janet With Love. 

Women photographers have explored 

the truth and bared witness with profound 

effect. Photojournalist 

Stephanie Sinclair’s 

investigation of immolation 

uncovered the practice 

of forced marriage by 

children, some as young as 

five. Her decades-long project 

led to an international 

non-profit organization to 

protect girls’ rights and 

prevent child marriage. Her 

transmedia campaign, Too 

Young to Wed, has led to 

widespread awareness, 

advocacy and action. 

Documentary photographer, 

filmmaker and 

journalist Sara Terry is 

the Founder and Artistic 

Director of the Aftermath 

Project, a grant-making, educational nonprofit 

founded on the premise that “War 

is Only Half the Story.” Commenting on 

the value system used to define news, she 

notes, “The feminine point of view, which 

men can have, has not been prioritized. 

It has been marginalized and judged to 

not be considered a decisive factor for a 

feature story.” Aftermath just celebrated its 

10th year, in spite of not receiving mainstream 

financial backing or news coverage. 

A wave of women photojournalists 

tell their stories as insiders and challenge 

existing discriminatory power structures 

in their respective countries. Newsha 

Tavakolian, the youngest photographer 

to cover the 1999 Iranian student uprisings 

when she was 18 years old, is now 

a Magnum Associate. Her 

portrait series, Listen: Giving 

Voice to Iranian Women, 

gives voice to restricted 

Iranian women singers. 

Images from this series were 

included in a retrospective 

of her work at the Atlas 

Sztuki Art Gallery in Poland. 

”For me, a woman’s voice 

represents a power that if 

you silence it, imbalances 

society, and makes everything 

deform. I let the Iranian 

women singers perform 

through my camera while 

the world has never 

heard them.” 

Indian storyteller, artist and activist, 

Poulomi Basu, challenges taboos with 

her advocacy for humane conditions for 

women in Nepal. Her multimedia project, 

Ritual of Exile, exposed the harsh and dangerous 

reality of the ritual of Chhaupadi, 

which forces menstruating women to live 

alone in mud huts away from their families 

each month. Basu witnessed the declining 

health of a 16-year-old new mother and 

arranged a life-saving trip to the nearest 

hospital. The young mother survived and 

Basu’s work is seen as contributing to the 

2017 legislation criminalizing this 

degrading practice. 

”For me, a woman’s voice represents a 

power that if you silence it, imbalances 

society, and makes everything deform. 

I let the Iranian women singers perform 

through my camera while the world has 

never heard them.” 

—Newsha Tavakolian 

Women are profoundly impacting photojournalism 

and documentary photography. 

No longer in the shadows, our storytelling 

is creating necessary change and questioning 

the structures of power, challenging 

constructs which exclude women. As British 

scholar and classicist, Mary Beard, proclaims 

in Women and Power: “If women 

aren’t perceived to be within the structure 

of power, isn’t it power itself we need to 

redefine?” Seeing through a woman’s lens 

captures an inclusive and humane truth, 

free from binary interpretations. 

Newsha Tavakolian. Imaginary CD cover for Sahar. Caspian Sea. Mahmoudabad, 

Iran. 2011. © Newsha Tavakolian / Magnum Photos. 


BOOK 

REVIEWS 

WELCOME TO CAMP 

AMERICA: INSIDE 

GUANTÁNAMO BAY 

by Debi Cornwall 

Radius Books, 2017 

Essays by Moazzam Begg and 

Fred Ritchin 

190 pp./$50.00 

At the United States military prison 

camp known as Guantánamo Bay 

detention camp, visiting photographers 

were welcomed, as long as they 

complied with pages of rules. No photos 

of faces or locks. Photographers were 

always accompanied by military escorts, 

who would sometimes move them and their 

cameras until something that should not 

be seen was out of view. During nightly 

reviews of memory cards, the authorities 

deleted any images that broke the rules, 

stated or unstated. The photographs that 

were left showed only views consistent 

with the prison’s mission statement: “Safe, 

Humane, Legal, Transparent.” 

Debi Cornwall, a lawyer turned photographer, 

found brilliant ways to evade these 

restrictions of “transparency.” Her book, 

Welcome to Camp America, sketches 

the outlines of what cannot be shown by 

juxtaposing photographs of the areas 

of Guantánamo that hold detainees and 

“Camp America,” the recreational facilities 

for their guards. Stools pulled up to a 

tropical-themed bar contrast with a chair, 

laden with restraints, used during the 

force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees. 

A red plywood sleigh spray-painted with 

“Happy Holidays” perches on the roof of 

a life-sized gingerbread house, reinforcing 

the barrenness of a metal cage in detainee 

housing, holding only a folded prayer 

rug and a spray-painted arrow pointing 

towards Mecca. A sign printed with a 

reminder to call 911 “in case of emergency” 

hangs poolside, below a palm 

tree, reminding us that the detainees have 

no such recourse to aid. 

The book also contains text, including 

excerpts from court documents in 

which guards have described the horror 

of detainee conditions. The photographs 

offer commentary on this text, as when the 

description of a cover-up of abuse is accompanied 

by an image of cleaning supplies. 

A photograph of the American flag printed 

on a trash can is even more bitter. 

Photographers visiting Guantánamo 

could see detainees only during tightly 

controlled media tours. Conditions varied, 

but Cornwall reports that she saw detainees 

only through a two-way mirror. The 

military escort handed out bits of tape to 

the photographers to cover their cameras’ 

focus-assist light, which might otherwise let 

the detainees know they were being photographed. 

Rather than cooperating with 

depicting these detainees as “the worst of 

the worst,” Cornwall pointed out that hundreds 

of the men who were detained and 

tortured at Guantánamo were released 

after military commissions determined that 

they had been arrested by mistake or without 

any supporting evidence. She travelled 

to visit some of these former detainees, 

photographing them in collaborative creation, 

with their permission and in places 

of their choosing. 

Cornwall visited Guantánamo during 

the Obama Administration. Since President 

Trump took office, the words “legal” and 

“transparent” have been omitted from the 

prison’s mission statement. Photographers 

who wish to follow in Cornwall’s footsteps 

must find new ways to show Guantánamo, 

one that no longer maintains even the 

pretense of being visible. 

— Erin Thompson 

MFON: WOMEN 

PHOTOGRAPHERS OF THE 

AFRICA DIASPORA 

Co-edited by Laylah Amatullah 

Barrayn and Adama Delphine 

Fawundu 

Eye & I Inc., 2018 

$40.00 

MFON: Women Photographers 

of the Africa Diaspora is a 

revolutionary anthology of work 

dedicated to the memory of Mmekutmfon 

‘MFON’ Essien, a young, sharp and 

visionary Nigerian-American photographer 

who passed away in 2001. It is the 

beginning of an initiative that includes an 

annual publication and the establishment 

of the ‘MFON Legacy Grant’ which will 

be awarded to emerging black women 

photographers of African descent. The 

closest black women photographers have 

had to this in the past thirty years is Jeanne 

Moutoussamy-Ashe’s 1986 Viewfinders: 

Black Women Photographers that documented 

the contributions of black female 

photographers in the United States. 

‘MFON’ goes further and broader by 

encompassing women photographers of 

the African diaspora all around the globe 

and including essays written by women 

scholars, journalists and artists. 

The result of this is an impressive record 

of photographers of ages ranging from 

13 to 90, from Madagascar to Arkansas, 

Johannesburg to London, Stockholm to 

Chicago, working across different genres 

from fine art to commercial photography. 

It is, however, not a comprehensive survey 

or a complete history of black women 

photographers, and neither was it intended 


to be. Instead, it includes a cross-section of 

images selected to frame stories about freedom, 

justice, belonging and repossession 

of selfhood. Roaming through the over 100 

photographs included in this anthology is 

the gaze of the black woman in diaspora, 

revealing what she sees, the questions 

she asks and the ways she imagines and 

reimagines the world. Many of the women 

in this book focus their cameras on their 

own bodies, families and communities, and 

some of the rites and rituals that come with 

these possessions from religion to motherhood, 

food, sexuality and the subject of 

black hair, beauty and fashion. Some 

look out, interrogating the boundaries 

of blackness and others look at celebrity 

figures and socio-political phenomena 

shaping our world today. These are essays 

and photographs bearing voices that are 

often ignored, not taken seriously, or not 

given the opportunity to develop and their 

presentation evokes links across the African 

continent and diaspora. This is an anthology 

that understands that who we are 

depends on how we see and are seen. 

Agency, community and possibility 

are the currents running through this book 

and it pulls on this current by anchoring 

its focus on self-portraiture: the practice of 

including one’s self and history in the well 

of narratives, literally and symbolically. 

Beside the inspiring talent it showcases, 

this book is important because representation 

matters, especially when it’s one brimming 

with possibility; one that squarely 

says, especially to women photographers 

of the African diaspora: “you can be, be 

and be better.” It is “a love letter to lovers 

of photography, black women, women of 

African descent, those who show up, those 

who are present, lens folk,” as Laylah 

Barrayn says in her editor’s note. 

—Immaculata Abba 

TRANSCENDENTS: SPIRIT 

MEDIUMS IN BURMA AND 

THAILAND 

By Mariette Pathy Allen 

Essay by Eli Coleman, PhD., Preface by 

Zackary Drucker 

Daylight Books 

142 pp./$45.00 

For Transcendents, her fourth book 

exploring the lives of gender nonconforming 

people, Mariette Pathy 

Allen turns her lens on the spirit mediums 

of Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand. 

Allen is an artist and activist who has 

been documenting gender variance for 

decades. Her first book, Transformations: 

Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them 

(E.P. Dutton) was published in 1989. Since 

that time, she has continued to focus on 

the transgender community, and brings 

to her work the benefit of a decades-long 

immersion. As such, her images are not 

voyeuristic, nor do they seek to be sensational. 

In the preface, Zackary Drucker, 

transgender LGBTQ activist and producer 

of the television series “Transparent,” notes 

that the power of Allen’s documentation of 

trans and gender nonconforming lives is in 

the way it quietly shows “trans folk living 

among their fellow country-people, fully 

integrated into the fabric of their communities 

and living openly…” 

In the communities in Burma (Myanmar) 

and Thailand that Allen photographed 

over the course of four trips, she captured 

individuals who serve as mediums to the 

spirit world. The two countries share a 

similar culture of Animist spirit worship that 

coexists with the predominantly Buddhist 

culture. Mediums are the messengers to 

and of the spirits—who are called upon 

for guidance and favors. Transgender and 

gender nonconforming men are increasingly 

stepping into the esteemed role of 

medium that traditionally was held by 

women. In so doing they find a means of 

expressing their gender identity while also 

earning the respect of their families and 

communities. 

Burma and Thailand share a traditionally 

homophobic and transphobic culture. 

It is all the more powerful, therefore, that 

these individuals have found a role within 

the context of their cultures that allows 

them to flourish and to be fully integrated 

into their communities. Allen’s collaborator, 

Eli Coleman, PhD., professor and director 

of the Program in Human Sexuality at the 

University of Minnesota, remarks on the 

way in which Allen’s photographs “show 

how the status of transgender individuals 

is socially constructed and more or less 

stigmatizing, depending on the context.” 

Allen has an MFA in painting and has 

brought this sensibility to her photographic 

work: She seems to delight in layered, 

saturated color. Transcendents contains 75 

plates, which are a mix of portraiture and 

documentary-style photographs of mediums 

mid-ceremony. These are punctuated 

by a handful of still lifes and landscapes 

that are intended to put the other images 

in the context of their geographic and cultural 

setting. The portraits have a certain 

formality to them; they are not intimate, but 

rather, are politely distant and respectful. 

You sense that the subjects had a hand 

in composing them. There are only a 

few photographs that capture in-between 

moments—a medium painting their nails 

on the seat of their motorcycle, applying 

makeup, or enjoying a glass of wine. 

These glimpses add another dimension to 

the story, and leave the viewer wanting 

more of them. 

Taken together, the photographs of 

Transcendents tell a story of both the 

unique mystery of the mediums’ spirituality 

and—equally important—of the mundane 

and unremarkable aspects of their everyday 

lives as members of their communities. 

—Jenna Mulhall-Brereton 


ON THE FRONTLINE 

by Susan Meiselas 

Aperture 2017 

256 pp./$29.75 

Susan Meiselas’s On the FrontLine 

is not so much a photo book as an 

illustrated consideration of what 

photographs can and should do, framed 

by the career of a hugely influential photojournalist, 

writer, activist, curator, and 

educator. Some of Meiselas’s images have 

entered popular memory as archetypes 

and symbols. She has long held leadership 

roles among the people and institutions 

that link documentary practice with social 

justice. Meiselas’s thoughtful description 

and analysis of her practice is the result 

of some 40 years of making pictures and 

thinking about them, while also trying to 

make sense of the larger world and her 

responsibilities to it. 

The book’s opening images show the 

forensic unearthing of mass graves that 

Meiselas documented in Kurdistan in 1991. 

As front matter, they resonate as metaphor 

for the relentless digging into the past that 

characterizes Meiselas’s work. Her pattern 

of returning over decades to a place she 

photographed is a way of recognizing that 

photographs are slippery and the story is 

ongoing, but it also lets her acknowledge 

that her past work there is now a part of 

multiple histories of a place that merit continuous 

re-consideration. 

The bulk of the book is a careful blending 

of words and images that investigate 

the idea of narrative as the link between 

Carnival Strippers and Kurdistan, Prince 

Street Girls and the Dani, Nicaragua and 

scenes of domestic violence. Each story 

is told of and with the people the photographs 

depict, but these stories extend well 

beyond the frozen photographic moment 

to include past and future and multiple 

perspectives. From her earliest photojournalism 

to recent experiments in publication 

and installation, Meiselas has sought ways 

to help those who are often voiceless tell 

their stories. On the Front Line is notable 

because it affirms both why and how this 

must be done. 

Everything about this book encourages 

us to weight words and pictures equally. 

The book is small and in vertical format, to 

be held in the hands rather than displayed 

on a coffee table. A third of the pages are 

text; her photographs, while thoughtfully 

chosen and sequenced, are de-emphasized 

by reproductions that demand less 

attention than the lavish prints we have 

come to expect in art books. Meiselas’s 

words are direct, open, conversational, 

and considered, a tribute to the interview 

format from which the essay is derived, 

and the skill, sympathy and intelligence of 

Mark Holborn, interviewer and editor. 

I can’t think of another photographer’s 

memoir that so rigorously considers 

picture-making as a practice with intellectual, 

aesthetic and moral dimensions. This 

is an essential book for photographers, 

theorists, historians and others who care 

about pictures, not just for what they look 

like but for what they do. 

---Alison Nordström 

TRACES 

By Weronika Gęsicka 

J. & W. Gęsicka, M. Sokalska, 2017 

64 pp. / $35.00 

Somewhere along the way we collectively 

decided that the 1950s and 

60s were the heyday of the American 

Dream. Despite the fact that the era was 

rife with racism, sexism, war, and myriad 

other issues, photographs of that time conjure 

up notions of suburban idealism: twoparent 

households with freshly scrubbed 

kids, cold glasses of milk, and warm slices 

of apple pie. 

Traces by Weronika Gęsicka upends 

such rosy-colored memories, slicing them 

apart and rearranging them so the fragments 

become a Frankensteinian version 

of history—a monstrous reimagining of a 

sugar-coated past. Using stock photographs 

from the 1950s and 60s, Gęsicka deftly 

manipulates the content, reworking mundane 

commercial imagery of happy families and 

young lovers in a variety of situations—mowing 

the, lawn, roasting marshmallows, and 

sitting around the dinner table—into surreal 

tableaus that underscore the fear and anxiety 

that permeated the time. 

Post-war America may have been 

prosperous and victorious, but the specter 

of WWII still loomed over the country 

and fear of Communism, homosexuality, 

desegregation and civil rights, and the war 

on drugs permeated the nation’s conscious. 

Anxiety was at the forefront of the medical 

and psychiatric fields, and self-medication 

was rampant given the accessibility of alcohol, 

tobacco, and prescription drugs (not to 

mention the use of illegal drugs like heroin 

and marijuana). However, along with these 

anxieties came the rise of American commercialism, 

which promoted ideals such 

as the nuclear family and the American 

Dream as existing in symbiosis with luxury 

cars and household goods. In the midst of 

a sea of uncertainties, the obvious antidote 

seemed to be spending money. 

Gęsicka’s photographs dissect the relationship 

between ideological consumerism 

and societal ills. In one photograph, soda 

shop patrons are swallowed up by the 

shop’s interior, engulfed by the countertop 

and the interior’s wood paneling and 

wallpaper. In another, children run down 

the front sidewalk of a house toward their 

father’s outstretched arms, except a portion 

of the sidewalk is missing, indicating 


that they are instead running towards their 

deaths. The images are at once funny and 

haunting, the sort that make you chuckle 

and shake your head while sending shivers 

down your spine. Through her darkly 

playful reimagining, Gęsicka exposes the 

machinations of the collective desire to 

escape the terrifying traces of our past. 

Do we even know who we are or where 

we have come from, or are we better off 

pretending we are something else? 

—Danielle Avram 

HUMAN TRIBE 

by Alison Wright 

Schiffer Publishing, 2017 

180 pp /$55.00 

Alison Wright’s fifth photography 

book, Human Tribe, takes viewers 

through an immersive journey 

into the unified experience of human life 

around the globe. With every turn of the 

page, viewers are confronted with a new 

face from a different part of the world. 

Wright writes in the introduction of the 

book that her intention with these portraits 

is to reflect the complexity and beauty of 

humanity, while highlighting our common 

desires and needs as humans on earth. 

Wright has a distinct documentary style, 

producing frames that lend each portrait 

a unique character. Each person shares a 

part of themselves. Their eyes communicate 

a story—some warm, some intense, some 

vulnerable, but each shared with intention. 

The colors maintain a vibrant thread 

throughout the book. Whether through a 

beaded necklace, a cigar hanging out of 

an older man’s mouth, or luminescent water 

reflecting in the background, each person’s 

story is amplified by the colors captured in 

the frame. 

The author compliments her stunning 

portraits by positioning the photos with 

nuanced coordination, continuing a 

narrative and conversation between the 

subjects. On page 68 and 69, Wright 

positions a photo of a toddler leaning into 

another baby’s crib in juxtaposition with 

a middle-aged man and woman dancing 

in Buenos Aires, mirroring the posture 

of tango. Aligned together, these two 

narratives of movement explore the ways 

we express human energy. Page 48 and 

49 show a middle-aged man posing in 

a straight-on portrait in Lanzhou, China 

opposite a young boy from Omo Valley, 

Ethiopia. Each gazes straight into the 

viewer’s eyes. While the older man wears 

big circular glasses made with smoothened 

plastic and glass frames, the young 

boy’s similar round glasses seem to be 

self-made of styrofoam and wire—both are 

looking through a lens to view the world. 

Wright’s intentional sequencing of bold 

colors magnifies the synchronicity and 

unity of human experiences. 

Human Tribe furthers Alison Wright’s 

unique ability to reveal individual essence 

and offer insight into our shared human 

experience. She accomplishes her goal of 

capturing the diversity of human life and 

she does so with an exquisite eye. 

—Nayo Sasaki-Picou 

Social Documentary Network 

A Global Network for Documentary Photography 

More than a website 

Michael Kamber (left), director of the Bronx 

Documentary Center, and Glenn Ruga (right) 

SDN director, at opening reception for SDN 

exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center. 

Exhibitions 

Spotlight 

ZEKE Magazine 

assignmentLINK 

Education 

Special Issues and 

Interviews 

Documentary Matters 

Join us! And become part of the 


www.SocialDocumentary.net 


Contributors 

Photographers 

Casey Atkins is a freelance photographer 

and filmmaker. She is a member of the Boston 

Press Photographers Association and the 

National Press Photographers Association, 

as well on the board for the New England 

chapter of the American Society of Media 

Photographers.She is a director of Women’s 

Worth, Inc., a nonprofit which provides 

business skills training to low-income women 

in Nicaragua. 

Delphine Blast is a French documentary 

and portrait photographer, based in Bolivia. 

She works on various issues related to 

development with a strong focus on women’s 

issues in South America. 

Amber Bracken is a member of Rogue 

Collective and a lifelong Albertan. Her 

interest is in the intersection of photography, 

journalism, and public service with a special 

focus on First Nations People. 

Joan Lobis Brown is a photographer 

whose portrait projects highlight segments 

of our society that have been subjected to 

intense stigma. 

Vidhyaa Chandramohan is an editorial 

& documentary photographer from India, 

currently based in Abu Dhabi. Her long-term 

projects delve into women-related projects/ 

issues, human rights and gender identity. 

Jean Chung is an award-winning photojournalist 

based in Seoul, South Korea who 

gained international recognition with her 

series of photo-reportage in Afghanistan 

and Africa. 

Anica James is a documentary photographer 

and photography instructor currently 

based in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. 

She is a member of Muse Projects and 

Women Photograph. 

Susan Kessler is a practicing architect 

turned documentary photographer who is 

most passionate about photographing for 

organizations that positively impact the lives of 

women and children in developing countries. 

Heba Khamis is an Egyptian storyteller 

whose work concentrates on social issues 

that are often ignored. 

Valerie Leonard travels the world following 

her theme, “Labours of Hercules,” a series of 

photographs that attempts to show with utmost 

respect the dignity of women and men living 

and working in hostile environments. 

Amy Martin uses her camera’s lens to 

increase awareness, understanding and compassion 

across physical and social barriers. 

Marinka Masséus’s photography revolves 

around people and is a constant reflection 

of her passion and fascination for human 

nature and the way we live our lives. Topics 

concerning injustice and gender inequality 

are a driving force behind her work. 

Emily Schiffer is a photographer and 

mixed media artist interested in the intersection 

between art, community engagement, 

and social change. 

Maranie Rae Staab is a Pittsburghbased, 

independent photographer and 

journalist working to document human 

rights and social justice issues, displacement 

and how violence and war affect 

individuals and societies. 

Danielle Villasana is an independent photojournalist 

whose documentary work focuses 

on women, identity, human rights, and 

health. She is currently based in Istanbul 

and contributes to Redux. 

Beata Wolniewicz is a Polish photojournalist 

and documentary photographer, who 

has travelled to many countries including 

Georgia, Ghana, Israel, Lebanon, USA, 

Poland and many European countries. 

Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi was born in 

Romania to a Romanian mother and Iraqi 

father. She uses photography to explore the 

human condition across various political and 

cultural contexts. She is based in Brooklyn, 

NY but often works in areas experiencing 

social unrest or humanitarian emergencies. 

Writers 

Immaculata Abba is a writer and photographer 

studying History and Comparative 

Literature at Queen Mary University of 

London. 

Danielle Avram is a writer, photographer, 

and curator based in Dallas, Texas. 

Wendy McDowell is a writer and editor 

living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the 

Senior Editor of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. 

Jenna Mulhall-Brereton is both a photographer 

and a professional in the philanthropy 

sector—two passions that are fueled 

by her travels throughout the world. 

Alison Nordström is an independent 

writer and curator based in Cambridge, 

Massachusetts specializing in historical and 

contemporary photographs of all kinds. 

Formerly the Director and Senior Curator 

of the Southeast Museum of Photography, 

(Florida)and Senior Curator of Photographs 

at George Eastman House, (New York) she 

is the author of over 100 published books 

and essays on photographic topics, and has 

curated over 150 photographic exhibitions in 

nine countries. 

Ladan Osman was born in Somalia, her 

chapbook, Ordinary Heaven, appears in 

Seven New Generation African Poets. She is 

a contributing editor of The Offing and lives 

in Chicago. 

Nayo Sasaki-Picou is a New York-based 

interdisciplinary artist and recent graduate 

of New York University’s Master of Arts 

program. Her latest written and photographic 

work is featured on SDN and titled Afrobeat: 

The Way She Moves. 

Anne Sahler is an internationally published 

writer, photographer and graphic designer 

who divides her time between Japan and her 

homeland of Germany. Her curious nature 

and never-ending need for travel help lend a 

clarity of perspective to an evermore complicated 

world. 

J. Sybylla Smith is an independent curator 

with more than 25 solo or group exhibitions 

featuring over 80 international photographers 

exhibited in the US, Mexico and South 

America. An adjunct professor, guest lecturer 

and thesis advisor, Sybylla has worked with 

the School of Visual Arts, the School of the 

Museum of Fine Arts, Wellesley College, and 

Harvard University. She is also the guest editor 

of the Women’s Issue of ZEKE magazine. 

Erin Thompson studies the damage done 

to humanity’s shared heritage through looting, 

theft, and the deliberate destruction of 

art. She co-curated “Ode to the Sea: Art from 

Guantánamo,” the first full-scale exhibit of 

art created by detainees at Guantánamo 

Bay Detention Camp, displayed at John Jay 

College of Criminal Justice. 

Ezinne Ukoha is a multimedia journalist 

and the founding editor of MyTrendyBuzz, 

a pop culture and entertainment-themed 

website. She was raised in Lagos, Nigeria 

and recently recognized as one of Medium’s 

Noteworthy writers. 


WOMENON FIRE 

TRENDING WOMEN 

PHOTOGRAPHERS 

ON SDN 

Of the hundreds of exhibits submitted to SDN 

each year, these four stand out as exemplary 

and deserving of further attention. 

Karen Kasmauski: In the Care of Children. The bind 

of motherhood is so powerful that even in the most dire 

circumstances women find whatever means possible to 

survive and provide. 

Holly Lynton: Bare Handed. Documenting vanishing 

industries and the individuals who resist mechanization or 

technology and work with their bare hands, maintaining an 

intimate connection to their labor. 

Ingetje Tadros: Caged Humans in Bali. This exhibit 

raises awareness about the issue of Pasung—the physical 

restraint with chains, ropes and cages of the mentally ill 

in Indonesia while under the care of their families. In this 

photo, a metal cage separated from the main house has 

been Sari's prison for over sixteen years. 

Michele Zousmer: Hidden Ireland—Irish Travellers. 

Uncovers this marginalized group with a predominance 

of sexualizing girls from a young age and very high 

(51%) rate of domestic violence. 


Resources 

Women Photograph 

www.womenphotograph.com 

Women Photograph is an initiative that 

launched in 2017 to elevate the voices of 

female visual journalists. The private database 

includes more than 700 independent women 

documentary photographers based in 91 

countries and is available to any commissioning 

editor or organization. 

Women Photojournalists of 

Washington 

www.womenphotojournalists.org 

Women Photojournalists of Washington is a 

nonprofit dedicated to educating the public 

about the role of women in photojournalism 

and fostering their professional success. 

With over 250 members across the visual 

journalism field, WPOW creates a strong 

community of women photojournalists who 

gather to inspire and educate. 

Women’s Photo Alliance 

Facebook Group 

@wpanyc Instagram 

The Women’s Photo Alliance (WPA) was 

founded in 2015 to promote and support 

women photographers in order to diversify 

a male-dominated field. The group’s mission 

is to offer multiple perspectives, challenge 

stereotypes, and make the point of view of 

women more universal. 

Native Foundation 

www.nativeagency.org 

While the journalism and documentary 

industry struggle with issues of diversity and 

representation, Native wants to change 

visual journalism to be representative of 

diverse talent from across the globe. We 

connect emerging journalists, documentary 

makers and visual storytellers from underrepresented 

regions and communities with 

major publications and introduce them to a 

global audience. 

Alliance for Women in Media 

www.allwomeninmedia.org 

The Alliance for Women in Media is an organization 

for women, by women. We are committed 

to supporting women across all media 

segments, to expand networks, educate and 

celebrate accomplishments. 

Interview with Aida Muluneh 

Continued from page 34. 

still a very male-dominated industry, 

regardless of whether you’re 

looking at Africa or Europe or the 

world. To me, the challenges are 

based on my own personal perceptions 

and limitations, but I found 

that being a woman has more 

advantages and it gives you more 

access to whatever you’re trying to 

express. I’ve seen some improvement, 

but it’s still not enough. 

OPEN CALL 2018 

We are seeking 

submissions for the 

fifth edition of AFF 

that offer insight and 

a unique perspective 

from photographers 

around the world. 

www.addisfotofest.org 

Throwing off your 

hijab in Tehran 

And other stories from 

the modern world. 

Subscribe to ZEKE magazine and get the best of global 

documentary delivered to your mailbox and inbox twice a 

year. Each issue presents outstanding photography on topics 

as diverse as people living with AIDS, climate change, 

Vietnam reconsidered, nationalism in Russia, maternal 

health in Africa, and other issues of global concern. 

Subscribe today! 

$19 00/ Two issues a year in print and digital 

Subscriptions received through August 2018 will start 

with the Women’s Issue. 

www.zekemagazine.com 

Photograph by Marinka Masséus 



Spring 

THE MAGAZINE OF GLOBAL DOCUMENTARY 

Published by Social Documentary Network 

Donors to The Campaign for ZEKE 

ZEKE magazine and SDN would like to thank the following 

donors to The Campaign for ZEKE. Their support allows ZEKE 

to continue publishing. If you would like to support ZEKE, please 

visit www.zekemagazine.com/campaignforzeke 

Founding Sponsor 

Roree Iris Williams 

Benefactor 

Rudi Dundas 

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Inc. 

Sustainer 

Anonymous Donor 

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Susan Mazer 

Supporter 

Anonymous Donors (1) 

Carol Allen-Storey 

Dr. and Mrs. Julien P. Ayotte 

Connie Frisbee Houde 

Robert I. Usdan and 

Amy Yenkin 

Jan Zychlinski 

Contributor 


Farida Alam 

Dawn Colsia 

Margo Cooper 

Morrie Gasser 

Vivien Goldman 

John Parisi 

Pedro Perez 

Jamie Rose 

Bruce Rosen 

Carolina Sandretto 

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Winston 

Donor 


Michelle Bogre 

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Helena Long 

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Patrick McCarthy 

Nathaniel Novod 

Alice Nudelman 

Tracy Price 

James Pyrzynski 

Mark Tuschman 

Benita VanWinkle 

Andrea Zocchi 

2018 Vol. 4/No. 1 

ZEKE is published by Social Documentary Network (SDN), an 

organization promoting visual storytelling about global themes. 

Started as a website in 2008, today SDN works with thousands 

of photographers around the world to tell important stories 

through the visual medium of photography and multimedia. Since 

2008, SDN has featured more than 2,800 exhibits on its website 

and has had gallery exhibitions in major cities around the world. 

All the work featured in ZEKE first appeared on the SDN website, 

www.socialdocumentary.net. 


Executive Editor: Glenn Ruga 

Guest Editor: J. Sybylla Smith 

Editor: Barbara Ayotte 

Social Documentary 

Network 

Founder & Director: Glenn Ruga 

Communications Director: 

Barbara Ayotte 

SDN Advisory Committee 

Lori Grinker, New York, NY 

Independent Photographer and 

Educator 

Catherine Karnow, San Francisco, 

CA 

Independent Photographer and 

Educator 

Ed Kashi, Montclair, NJ 

Member of VII photo agency 

Photographer, Filmmaker, Educator 

Reza, Paris, France 

Photographer and Humanist 

Molly Roberts, Washington, DC 

Senior Photography Editor, 

National Geographic 

Jeffrey D. Smith, New York NY 

Director, Contact Press Images 

Jamey Stillings, Sante Fe, NM 

Independent Photographer 

Steve Walker, Danbury, CT 

Consultant and Educator 

Frank Ward, Williamsburg, MA 

Photographer and Educator 

Amy Yenkin, New York, NY 

Independent Producer and Editor 

ZEKE is published twice a year by 


Copyright © 2018 


ISSN 2381-1390 

ZEKE does not accept unsolicited 

submissions. To be considered for 

publication in ZEKE, submit your 

work to the SDN website either as 

a standard exhibit or a submission 

to a Call for Entries. Contributing 

photographers can choose to pay 

a fee for their work to be exhibted 

on SDN for a year or they can 

choose a free trial. Free trials have 

the same opportunity to be published 

in ZEKE as paid exhibits. 

To Subscribe: 


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USA 

PUBLISHER OF ZEKE MAGAZINE 

©Sheila Pree Bright 

Supporting Women Photojournalists 

We are proud to be a sponsor of ZEKE and the fine women photographers who 

appear in this issue. In the past year we have provided support to Women Photojournalists of 

Washington, Women Photograph Insider/Outsider, Stephanie Keith’s exhibition - 

Killing the Black Snake Resistance at Standing Rock, to name just a few. 

DSI Digital Silver Prints ® • Color Pigment Prints • Complete Mounting & Matting Services 

Custom Framing • B&W + Color Film Developing • Shipping World Wide 

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ZEKE: Spring 2018

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