How women photographers can expand our view of conflict

We ask a lot of conflict photographs. We rely on them to help us forge emotional connections to stories that might otherwise seem too abstract or distant to bother with; to provide visual evidence of genocide; and to share visual stories of suffering, love, cowardice, perseverance, loneliness, death, and loyalty that are part of conflict of any kind. For those of us who don’t personally experience war, Susan Sontag wrote, conflict pictures have the biggest impact on our understanding of it. But for the most part, that understanding—from daguerreotypes of the Mexican-American War in 1846 to digital images from the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been shaped by men.

It is hard to know exactly how many conflict photographers there are, and of them, how many are women. News photography remains heavily male-dominated, with some estimates putting women at about 15 to 20 percent of news photographers, despite outnumbering men in undergraduate and graduate programs. Gender seems to shape these photographers’ assignments. According to a July 2018 study by researchers at the University of Stirling, women photographers are less likely than men to photograph news and sports—subjects that grace front pages and win major prizes.

Other research has shown that women photographers are less likely to be assigned stories perceived to be dangerous, particularly conflict and war. As a result—apart from a few well-known names like Lynsey Addario, Margaret Bourke-White, and Susan Meiselas—there have been very few women conflict photographers compared to men. In fact, only two dozen women were included among the more than 280 photographers featured in the major 2012 exhibition “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath.” Such omissions speak to the many ways women’s achievements are regularly left out of the historical record (“Women War Photographers,” a new show at the KunstPalast in Dusseldorf up through June 10, seeks to restore women’s names to the archive).

The paltry number of women war photographers has surely impacted the millions of conflict pictures taken since photography’s invention in 1839. And while the influence of such photographs is still debated, they do seem to drive policy and public opinion: the iconic photograph (taken by Turkish photographer Nilufur Demir) of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee boy whose body washed ashore on a Turkish beach, boosted donations to international aid organizations, including the Red Cross, and inspired Canadian lawmakers to revise their country’s asylum laws. Historically, authorities have consciously used photographs to change hearts and minds: after World War II, Allied powers installed news photographs of concentration camps in shop windows across Germany as part of the denazification campaign of civilians and soldiers alike.

While gender itself doesn’t determine the photographs a person takes, it can influence her access to scenes and people and shape the photographs that circulate as a result. That’s important for any story, especially ones about deeply complex issues like rape as a tool of war. Mumbai-based photographer Sara Hylton, who has photographed for six years across Pakistan, India, South Sudan, Lebanon, Turkey, and El Salvador, points to rape survivors as one example. She said that women raped as part of conflict, like the women she photographed in South Sudan, are often disowned by their families. Living in refugee camps, many are forced to raise the children who resulted from those rapes alone. “To even have the most sensitive man go into a situation like that – I cannot imagine how that would feel for the person sharing their stories,” she said. “It’s hard enough as it is.”

Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi, who has reported from the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past five years, made a similar observation. Her photographs of the Minova Rape Trial, in which 37 soldiers charged with the rapes of some thousand civilians—men, women, and children—stood trial in 2014, are notable for the intimacy with which she shows rape survivors in and out of court. “I think everyone can imagine that rape victims are much more comfortable speaking to me than [they are] with a male journalist,” she said.

Journalists don’t always “respect that [assault survivors] may not want to be in the room with a man,” said Nicole Tung, a freelance photographer who has photographed conflict in the Middle East and Africa since 2011. Yet the importance of sending women to photograph these stories is often overlooked. “It’s a really big mistake,” she said. 

When it comes to access, being female can also be an asset because women are often perceived as less threatening than men. “Photography isn’t that different from other aspects of life in that you carry your identity with you wherever you go,” said Nairobi-based Nichole Sobecki, a member of the VII photo agency who photographs throughout Africa, and who recently won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights prize for her work on the African migration crisis. “As a woman, I’m underestimated all the time, and of course you turn that to your advantage. My goal is always to tell the story to the best of my ability, and if not being perceived as a threat will help me with that, then all to the good.”

Seeming unthreatening can be especially important for journalists working in dangerous places that lack a clearly marked “front line.” Adriana Zehbrauskas, who has photographed in Mexico for the past 15 years, told Women Under Siege, “In a war, you know who your enemies are. But in Mexico, that line is really fluid.” Corrupt police and government officials often collaborate with drug cartels. Fears of kidnapping are widespread. Journalists are attacked with relative impunity; over the past decade, 28 have been killed in retaliation for their work. In an environment of great danger and distrust, Zehbrauskas said, “people don’t like to be photographed.” But to make intimate photographs, a photographer has to gain intimate access. “As photographers, we have to get into people’s houses, ask to be around their children, sometimes even sleep at people’s houses,” Zehbrauskas said. This is where her gender is an asset: “As women, we can get away with that easier.”

Such intimacy is evident in Zehbrauskas’s photographs of migrant children traveling with their families through Mexico, whom she accompanied on the road, and her feature on retired sex workers in Mexico City, for which she spent months talking to the women at length in their bedrooms. “It would be very difficult for a man to have that intimacy,” she said. Yet without these photographs as “evidence,” we might never think about how asylum-seeking families travel with their children—pushing strollers at sunrise, carrying infants in their arms—or even consider life after sex work.

In fact, being female, and seeming unthreatening as a result, can make it easier for women to gain access to stories that are otherwise under-reported. For example, Zehbrauskas said that indigenous Mexican women in Chiapas and Oaxaca can be wary of outsiders, which is one reason journalists may overlook stories about health and domestic violence in their communities. Stories on maternal mortality, like one Tung recently photographed in the Central African Republic, are under-reported as well, as are stories about women who give birth in conflict environments without access to basic medical care. Another veteran editor and photographer noted that because of men’s difficulty accessing scenes of female genital mutilation, stories about clitoral cutting, the girls and women it affects, and the procedure’s aftermath, are “under-pictured.” Nor are there many photographs of female fighters, regardless of the conflict. Alhindawi pointed to her project on a female rebel in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a mother of seven “who spends her whole life with an AK-47 on her back. I’ve taken pictures of her bathing, which she still has her gun even then. Or in her house with the kids when she puts them to bed,” she said. “There’s no way a man can follow her” like that. 

Yet without pictures to illustrate them, these topics—whose subjects are women—may not even register in the public imagination, nor garner the same kind of political or philanthropic attention that the Alan Kurdi photograph did.

To be fair, some women assert that their gender complicates their access to subjects. They may face harassment and condescension from subjects or fixers, police, or other authorities. The risk of sexual violence is also high. And because of the belief that women are less threatening than men, Alhindawi said, some people may perceive women as “weak and easily attacked.”

The potential for sexual violence can shape some photographers’ routines, even the seemingly straightforward decisions about which driver to hire or where to stay or eat. “Those little things that men can do without a problem—for us, we have to think three times before we do that,” said Zehbrauskas.

Still, in especially patriarchal societies where women and men are often segregated in their daily lives, women photographers have the advantage of being able to access both worlds, said Tung. “That’s such a key thing to be able to do, and for our industry to understand. When we can’t access women’s voices or photograph them in their environment, and also show how their lives are affected by conflict, then we’re missing a very vital perspective that’s generally 50 percent of the population.” Research on recent conflicts has confirmed as much. From the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq to TV stories of Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon, media often overemphasize images of men while vastly underreporting women’s experiences of conflict. But as recent stories on women who’ve left the Islamic State’s caliphate make clear—women once married to fighters as well as women who themselves fought for the Islamic State—any conflict, because it is between people, is as much about women as it is about men.

Diversifying who shoots which assignment isn’t the only way to expand the kinds of conflict photographs that circulate. Hylton pointed out that the mass media’s traditional focus on “front lines, blood, gore, and violence” is only part of the picture. “War and conflict can be about how people come together, about how humans support one another and survive—not just about people killing each other.” She added, “There are tender and intimate moments and ways of capturing how humans are resilient and brave despite the most trying circumstances.”

Lidia Pedro, a videographer who has covered conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Iraq, noted that editors often want stories similar to those run by rival news organizations: pictures from the front lines, what she terms “bang bang” stories. “Human ‘side stories’ are always there,” she said, from civilians’ disrupted lives to the work that paramedics do. “But most of the time we don’t cover them.”

Expanding the media’s notion of conflict may be important for yet another reason: rather than alert us to stories of human suffering, galvanizing us to effect change, some evidence suggests that the sheer volume of graphic photographs of conflict and violence may actually desensitize us to such events.

News organizations are partly to blame. They tend to rush from conflict to conflict, rather than document processes of reconciliation and rebuilding, said Sara Terry, an emeritus member of VII photo agency. Because she became a photographer after a successful career as a print journalist, she understood that cycle—and intentionally sidestepped it. “I knew what drove the news,” she said. “I had the ability to step outside of that cycle, to critique it, and say, ‘You know, there’s something more important going on here.’” She spent five years in Bosnia photographing the aftermath of the Balkan War, from exhumations of mass graves to the efforts restarting everyday life after the systematic genocide and deportation of Muslims. She founded the nonprofit Aftermath Project in 2005 to support in-depth projects about the costs of war, processes of forging peace and rebuilding, and the metaphoric and physical wounds borne by people, landscapes, and civil society that last far longer than the wars that caused them.

From Nina Berman’s work on the impact of the U.S.’s ongoing wars on American culture to Paula Luttringer’s photographs of the detention centers where women were tortured and disappeared during Argentina’s “dirty war,” the Aftermath Project extends traditional notions of what constitutes news about conflict.

“Anyone can be an aftermath photographer,” Terry said. “But I think it took a woman to start the Aftermath Project.” While everyone has masculine and feminine qualities, she added, “It’s a feminine perspective that thinks about the costs of things. That thinks about what’s left behind.”

Picturing the vast terrain of human experience can’t “come from one group of people,” said Tung. Indeed, we need photographers diverse in age, gender, ethnicity, geography, and class to take pictures of people, places, things, and conflicts we might not otherwise see, and—at their best—show us ideas and perspectives we’ve never considered. Such images bring the world to us and leave their print on the public imagination.