Imagery fed to international audiences amplifies stereotypes about places and people in the Global South because market forces are at play, says Bertan Selim, head of programmes at the Prince Claus Fund, which helped set up the Arab Documentary Photography Program. “The example that always gets pushed down people’s throats is a western one. That’s by default, whether it be how you do research or how you photograph or how you talk about events or how you create sellability out of a story,” says Selim. And what sells in the international media is often trauma and poverty.
Indeed, those primarily based in their native countries and who spoke to us for the study are very aware of what images appeal to international audiences, compared with the work they make for local audiences. Photographer Verónica Sanchis Bencomo founded the platform Foto Féminas to uplift the work of Latin American and Caribbean female photographers, including, most recently, London-based Venezuelan photographer Silvana Trevale and French-Peruvian photographer Florence Goupil, who is based in Peru. Sanchis Bencomo moved from Wales to Santiago, Chile, to do research and gained “a very different perspective”. She began to question why it was so hard to find content created by Latin American women, inspiring her later efforts to connect international audiences to that content.
Women throughout our study also described the photographic field as male-dominated, mobilising their distinctly female and local perspectives as balancing tools. “I realised the image of the women coming from my country were mostly from… a foreigner’s perspective and a male perspective,” says the anonymous photographer working in Asia. “So I wanted to come back to my country to focus more, and work on longer and deeper work on women, to show the life of women in the country from a female perspective.”
Meanwhile, Sagal Ali, founder of the Somali Arts Foundation, regards the organisation’s Still Life exhibition as sending subversive messages at every level. The show spotlighted the work of two female photographers – Fardowsa Hussein and Hana Mire – in an otherwise male-dominated industry. “[The exhibition] was the first of its kind in Somalia… it broke stereotypes – the [artists] are women, [the show was] curated by a woman, myself,” Ali says. “So the whole experience went against the dominant view of women, particularly women doing a professional job.”
However, before photographers in or with ties to the Global South can counter stereotypes in their work, they must first have access to jobs, and stereotypes often limit that access. The Arab Documentary Photography Program, which amplifies creative approaches to visual storytelling that challenge conventional narratives about the region, wanted to counter that from the outset. “There was a huge bias that there is no quality and that one was always forced to fly people in and have stories covered in that sense,” Selim says. “There’s also an inherent sort of laziness in activating networks and looking for people. It’s also not necessarily very cost-effective, and it takes time too.”
A woman in the study from Southeast Asia points out the absurdity of such an approach when someone needed a photo of a hotel in the city where she lives and works. “It was again by some white photographer, and I thought, ‘My gosh, you flew somebody out here with a huge carbon footprint to take a photo that anybody [here] could have taken,’” she says. “It is still frustrating and anxiety-inducing as someone who is emerging, who is a woman, and who is a person of colour, and you think, ‘What chance do I have of getting my foot in the door?’”
Tahmina Saleem, an Afghan photographer, interviewed three weeks before the fall of Kabul, said international media were aware of award-winning Afghan photographers but preferred to spend extra money instead of hiring local women. Meanwhile, in-country media protested the costs of hiring women – such as separate rooms and security. “It hurts you,” Saleem says. “You want to work. You want to work across Afghanistan; you want to cover across Afghanistan. But people are judging on their own that you can’t go to these areas, and they don’t give you the opportunity.”
The photographers value their intimate knowledge of where they are from and say it results in better-quality work in those locations. “We are living in this situation every day. We are seeing what is happening in the streets, more than anyone from outside coming and staying for a month or two who hasn’t seen the history, who hasn’t seen the insides, who doesn’t know the local language or understand the nitty-gritty of things,” says a photographer from the Middle East/North Africa.
Indeed, many women in our study brought up the role of gatekeepers in London, New York or Paris on behalf of western media organisations. One from sub-Saharan Africa specifically noted a preponderance of white men. “It goes higher than just the photographers on the ground. It’s obviously systematic,” she says.