by Michelle Woodward
We couldn’t have been wandering the hot, sun-bleached streets of ar-Raqqah for more than ten minutes when she found us. We were easy to spot in this provincial small town on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria’s vast agricultural flatlands. Her jeans and forward manner surprised us as much as the presence of an American couple in her neighborhood must have surprised her. She approached us sweetly and with great confidence. Since she was studying English and was on her way home from school, wouldn’t we come to meet her sisters and have tea with them? This was a unique moment in my experience since it’s usually men who approach foreigners in the Middle East. Her obvious delight at having run into exotic strangers and her desire to take us home to her sisters like a found curiosity charmed us immediately.
In the guest room of their small courtyard house we sat with her two older sisters on cushions and talked. Questions about family, work, love and life in our estranged countries circulated in a mixture of Arabic and English. The eldest sisters’ troubles with her husband who had just taken a second wife was as much a topic of discussion as the youngest sister’s job of driving a local bus and her tastes in Arab and American pop music.
But my strongest connection was to the middle sister, who is my own age, and spoke almost no English. We had a wordless, strangely immediate bond. Her serious eyes and thoughtful demeanor seemed to echo my own interior struggles to understand myself and my future. She is the only sister who wore a headscarf; made of a beautiful black cloth, she regularly adjusted it to sit loosely over her hair. To my surprise, just before we left, she took off her scarf for a group photograph with my camera. Maybe she thought that my American friends, looking at the photograph later, would find a head covering somehow backward. Whatever her reason, it was another sign to me that appearances can be hard to decipher and that issues like veiling and women’s roles in Middle Eastern society are multi-faceted and fluid.
The fact that she wore a headscarf (what foreigners often call the veil) but her sisters did not, is not unusual. A variety of factors affect a woman’s decision to veil or not and to what degree. Veiling can be as minimal as a loose scarf over the hair, or as enveloping as a full veil covering even the eyes, plus there are many variations in between. Often it is a personal decision stemming from one’s religious convictions. This doesn’t mean that veiled women are submissive, on the contrary, it often seemed to me that conservatively dressed women were very confident, outspoken, and active. However, an older woman I spoke to in Damascus expressed her frustration at the current popularity of veiling among young women, a tradition that many in her generation had fought against. She sees it as a dangerous trend away from secular values and women’s rights. Young women who veil cite not only religious beliefs as motivation, but also say a headscarf and Islamic dress (a long, loose dress or coat) gives them a certain freedom other women don’t have; it makes interacting with men at university or at work much easier. Men often treat women dressed conservatively with more respect and professionalism.
With or without her veil I still felt a little uncomfortable with taking photographs. I didn’t like the sense of having a hidden agenda. At the time, the summer of 1997, my partner and I were travelling around the Middle East for three months, both as a personal exploration and so that I could pursue work in photography. I would be submitting photographs of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon to a publisher in Amsterdam upon our return and I had been suffering all sorts of doubts about the project and my role as traveling photographer. I felt torn between wanting to enjoy the rapport I had with these young Syrian women unencumbered and the feeling that I should use this openness to make some unique photographs of women at home. I chose to forget about my camera until we left, and then took only a few snapshots that I could send to them later.
I’ve always found that traveling with a camera can be both problematic and exciting. It can stay stuck in between the visitor and the local resident, reducing interaction to an almost scripted, predictable transaction. Alternatively, taking photos can be a token of one’s appreciation of friendship, of one’s interest in a place, or of the desire to achieve a greater understanding. I also enjoy being able to approach the world in a creative way no matter where I am.
My biggest concern, though, has always been how to avoid reinforcing stereotypes of the Middle East. I dread the idea that pointing my camera at someone robs them of their complexities. I fear that my photos will render them flat, exotic specimens with nothing of their own to say to the viewer. I’m concerned not about stealing souls, but rather about locking them away, silent and voiceless, behind the superficial surface of the photograph.
As we journeyed on through Syria, exploring remote Roman ruins, busy port towns, and cosmopolitan cities, my fears of photography’s negative effects on our understanding of the world ebbed and flowed. At times I photographed freely, enjoying the thought that this everyday scene in Damascus of working boys taking a break on the "Street Called Straight" or that portrait of one of the last public storytellers in Syria at the Nofara Cafe might allow a Western viewer to see something of the normal reality behind the demonization of the Middle East. As I became more comfortable with my camera I also began to use it as a tool for learning. Rather than an intrusive presence I tried to incorporate it into my persona as something like a sixth sense, allowing myself to record observations visually and not just mentally. Photographing someone or something meant having to look more closely, to forge a trusting (even if momentary) bond, to pay attention to details and subtle feelings. It’s a way of training myself to see deeply.
My travels that summer were successful in a sense, I sold a number of photographs for publication and I had begun to develop my own style and vision. My experiences brought up many new questions about perception, how to insightfully represent others, and how to convey layers of meaning in the split second captured on film. It was the beginning of an ongoing process of developing a language in photography that can go beyond what’s obvious on the surface.
A few years later, however, I moved to Amman, Jordan and found work which was in many ways the opposite of what I wanted to do with photography: I became a press photographer. The old tradition of magazines publishing in-depth photojournalistic features of both text and photography seems to be fading, to be replaced by easy to digest, bite-sized news or entertainment stories. However, I thought news photography would be an interesting challenge and so I began calling the local bureaus of the international agencies. It turned out that Agence France Presse (AFP) had an opening. The Jordanian elections of 1997 were about to be held and they needed a stringer, a freelancer, to supplement the work of their full-time photographer. I suggested I show him my portfolio, he insisted that wasn’t important and instead asked that I do an assignment in the next few hours and bring him the roll of film. What they needed was photos that showed the local press coverage of the election campaigning. He explained it in detail: go downtown, take a newspaper with you, find a man wearing a kiffeya (traditional red and white checkered scarf), and ask him to pose reading the campaign news. As this was a human interest type photo rather than a strictly news photo, setting it up wasn’t seen as an issue.
So I headed downtown with a friend, stopping along the way to enlist the help of an Egyptian friend who could explain my motives to my potential models. Many men looked at me askance when asked to pose and gruffly brushed us off. Others seemed perplexed but jovially pretended to read the newspaper with the highly visual campaign ads facing the camera. It took quite a few set-ups to find the right man for the job, someone who looked like he really was reading the paper. Since he wasn’t someone who normally wears the kiffeya we pulled one out of a bag which we had brought along, just in case. Looking suitably Arab now for a foreign audience, I took a variety of photos with campaign banners and the local mosque in the background as onlookers gathered. In one frame two women wearing headscarves walked by, this was the photo that got me the job. All the right symbols were there: men and women with traditional head coverings to make sure viewers know this is the Middle East and signs of campaigning in the press and in the streets so we know this is about elections.
Although AFP is known for presenting more interesting and sophisticated photographs than the other international agencies, incorporating easy to read symbols such as veils, traditional dress, and posters of King Hussein, into our images was a constant theme. Instead of struggling to make photographs which would destroy cliches and provoke viewers to think (as I wanted to do), I had to be mainly concerned with creating an image that would get the story across in a single glance.
Every genre of photography has its own visual conventions and cliches. It isn’t easy to break away from them, I am only just beginning to even understand them, let alone be able to always challenge them in my own images. The struggle to represent the Middle East in a different light has become a compelling goal for me. The mental images many Americans conjure up at mention of it - terrorists, undifferentiated masses of fundamentalists, veiled women and bearded men, oil-rich princes living in excessive luxury - all spurs me on. The years I have lived and traveled in the Middle East have taught me a whole different reality, one that is much less "exotic" and is instead full of the fascinating diversity of humanity found anywhere in the world.