Where are the Women on the Family Photographs in Sanaa, Yemen? A Visual Exploration. by Irina Linke 1) Introduction This written text accompanies a presentation that includes the short documentary film This needs to be captured! (orig. title: Was fotografiert werden muss! / fr. Ce qui doit être photographié! / duration: 12 min.). It is a film on a local variety of the photographic genre “family portrait” in Sanaa, Yemen. On these photographs women and girls above the age of about 11 or 12 are not included. These studio photographs that I saw exposed in many Sanaani living rooms, especially in the old city, are made at the local photographer’s studio. They are made to be enlarged – 60 x 50cm upright is a common format –, framed behind glass and exposed on a prominent place in the most festive room of the house, the maglis, where visitors are received.
Image 1: Cover photograph of „This needs to be captured!“.
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Rather than being a text about the film, this is a text to accompany it. The film stands for itself as a visual exploration, and reading the text does not make up for seeing the film. The film reveals performative aspects of the “making of” these photographs. In this text, I want to contextualise the situation in which these photographs are taken by providing some ethnographic background knowledge. Further on, I am going to reflect on the relationship between photographs as visual representations of a cultural milieu and the filmmaker’s representation of this image making practice. When satellite dishes were introduced to Sanaa households and became increasingly common in the beginning of the 1990s, the time of the second Golf war, people got excessively exposed to television images from other Arab countries, the US, Europe, India and Russia. Eventually, the desire of the people to have their own pictures taken grew stronger and more widespread. Photographs in albums that date before this time were often taken on trips to other countries, e.g. Egypt, Syria or Irak. In the 1990s, foto studios in Sanaa opened sections for women only and hired female employees to work there (in the beginning mostly migrant women from outside Yemen, e.g. the Phillipines), so as to encourage social acceptance of women’s visits to the photography studio by guaranteeing that their picture will not be seen by non-mahram men. In Sanaa, family photographs are not the only photographs that we see on display in living rooms. While portraits of the head of the family are the most common, portraits of children (one-person portraits) are also exhibited very often. Studio photography has come to coexist with other widely spread photographic practices. People use small cameras at home and photographic prints are kept in albums, cupboards or boxes, sometimes hidden or locked away, especially when depicting women. Also, users of camera-equiped cell phones take photographs most of which never get printed. Women engage in these practices at least as much as men do. But, being veiled in public, especially women are very conscious about who has a copy of their photograph and who gets to see it. 2) The studio portraits The groups of relatives that come to the studio to have their photo taken pose in front of a scenery with trompe-l’oeil effect. Mostly the décor is painted, sometimes it is a photographic wall paper or complemented by sculptured elements. The scenery consists of green landscapes, waterfalls or elements of far away places (e.g. a moonlight silhouette of Asian houses in combination with a television tower ressembling the one on Berlin Alexanderplatz). Props 2
include neoclassical columns, small flights of stairs with balustrades, chairs, cushions, plush toys and battery driven plastic toys that make sounds. The décor recalls the décor of the studio photography that became popular in European cities in the second half of the 19th century. When studio photography spread in Europe, implicit rules about appropriate postures developed very quickly (Sagne 1998). Across national frontiers people took the same postures. Around the globe, photography universalized representational patterns. Photographers provided exotic accessories, props and things from other cultures to fullfill the customers’ desire for exoticism and escape from the profane day-to-day life. Despite similarities between Sanaa studio photography and earlier European family portraits, in Sanaa, the lack of women and of daughters from a certain age on is a striking variation to the family portrait genre and seems to be a strong statement. Conservative Islamic belief does not suffice as an explanatory pattern. A spectator of the film mentioned a similar mode of representative family photography to me, which he had witnessed in homes of conservative Islamic families in Indonesia. There, the “invisiblity” of the women was represented by their entirely veiled presence. 3) Beyond the frame of the picture In representative living rooms, in which the photographs are exposed, visitors are received. Visitors gather there in the afternoons to chew qat together, either in groups of female or of male visitors. In anthropological literature these gatherings are described as part of the “public sphere” in Yemeni society, even though they take place in homes (Mermier 1997, Vom Bruck 1997). Any man who joins an afternoon qat session in the host’s house sees these photographic representations of the family. Since women are veiled in public it seems only logical that they cannot be seen on photographs either. These photographs are taken on only two occasions of the year, either on Eid ul-Fitr (“Ramadan Eid”) in the 10th month of the Islamic calendar or on Eid ul-Adha (“Festival of Sacrifice“) a little more than two months later, from the 10th to the 13th of the twelfth month. In Sanaa both of these festivities last several days and are characterized by visits to family, extended family and friends. From a stack of photographs taken in his studio between approximately 1991 and 2006, the photographer was able to tell which year and on which one of the two occasions each photograph had been taken. He could tell from the background decoration in the studio. 3
I decided to work on these family photographs and to film their making, after I had gotten the chance to return to Sanaa and teach a seminar on documentary film at the Mass Communication Training and Qualifying Institute (MCTQI). Previously I had done one year of fieldwork in Sanaa during which I had already dealt with local image making practices and the subject of public images of women. Some of these photographs that had caught my attention in peoples homes during previous visits were exhibited in the entrance hall of the studios. They showed large families, including grown up sons and cousins with sons and daughters of their own. Usually, on the first morning of the festivity, after the men’s return from the mosque, men and children go and pay visits to the women of the family. Men visit the women in order to congratulate them and honor them by giving them money (casb ul-caid). For the occasion of the Eid everybody wears new and festive clothes. These groups of relatives, dressed up and in festive attire, walk the streets of the old city on the first morning of the festive days. It is on these occasions, that they stop by the photography studio and have their picture taken. They do so spontaeously and without an appointment. At the same time in the houses: The women are all dressed up at home, sitting in their decorated living room, receiving male relatives and visitors with children. The women have prepared cookies, drinks as well as assorted nuts, raisins and seeds to gnaw on. Bowls with burning incence and perfume bottles are passed for the visitors’ use. On the first morning, they receive men and children of the closer family. On the following mornings, visitors of the extended family or friends are welcomed. In the afternoons, the women too, leave the house to visit family and friends. These visits have the form of regular qat sessions, for which men and women gather seperately, in different houses, to sit, talk and chew qat. The women are missing on the photographs, but the groups on the photographs, the day of their visit to the studio, were about to visit the women in order to honor them. This knowledge about what happens beyond the frame of the photograph adds at least another nuance to these seemingly deficient photographs. What me concerns, throughout the days of the Eid, I did not get to see and film the really large families having their picture taken. I came to film smaller groups. Maybe this is because I missed the first morning of the Eid. Additionally, on this particular Eid, there had not been a big rush on the studio close to the old city anyway. Families had already gotten their picture taken on Eid ul-Fitr, the first Eid in the year only two months earlier and did not get a second photograph shortly after. Thirdly, the studio close to the old city and conveniant for the big 4
groups to pass by, did not offer possibilities of digital image processing with digital backgrounds and props as other studios meanwhile did. In the studio, where most of the film was shot, the décor mostly gets replaced by digitally generated décor and effects. 4) Embodied knowledge and filmic approach The first scene of the film reveals some characteristics of my filmic approach to theses photographs that are lacking the female members beyond pubescence. The scene shows a family in the entrance hall of the photography studio. While the right edge of the picture shows the entrance door with windows to the street, on the left edge the counter can be seen. In the middle of the frame the father with two small children turns spontaneously towards the camera and encourages his children to line up and pose as if for a group photograph. On the left edge of the picture his wife is busy at the shop counter. She is wearing the customary black gown, including a face veil that leaves only the eyes visible and is carrying her baby daughter on her arm. She turns around and, from her position on the left, hands the baby over to her husband into the group that is posing to be filmed. Instead of joining husband and children with the baby on her arm, she stands apart, as though she were outside of the picture to be taken.
Image 2: Film still of „This needs to be captured!“.
The scene had developed coincidently. I had been sitting in the shop, waiting, without the intention of filming the customers. When the father saw me with the video camera, he posed 5
holding his two children on hand and encouraging them to look into my camera. I got the camera ready and started to film. This was clearly not a studio scene, not a scene to create enlarged prints. But habitually the family assumed the “family picture pose” with the women somewhere beyond the frame, which is typical for the “official” representative photographs. Some minutes earlier, passing through the studio on my way from the laboratory to the entrance hall, I had gotten a glimpse of the photo session of this familiy. I had noticed that the wife was included, in festive dress and with open hair and I had moved on discretely, hoping not to frighten them by the sight of the video camera under my arm. There is no way that I could have filmed them then! So families do take family portraits including the women as well, but these photographs will not be exposed in the maglis and are not intended for the eyes of strangers, especially of men outside of the inner family circle. Even though the woman had just been photographed together with her family and although she was in her outdoor veil, she intuitively stayed outside of the group that was to be photographed. Maybe she just took the chance to get the baby off her arms in order to facilitate her activity at the counter. But nonetheless, it seems interesting to me that the family reproduced the same postures as on the openly exposed photographs. It becomes obvious that the woman is not passive in the scene. She is managing the situation, negotiating with the clerk at the counter and adding the baby to the group that is being filmed. Following this scene, the film mostly focusses on the moments wherein the photographs are taken. Just as in the introductory scene, filming these moments focusses on picture making as a social practice in which the women have their part. Pierre Bourdieus work on photography “as a middle-brow art” was a milestone in an approach to photography as a social practice and inspired the title of my film Ce qui doit être photographié! (which does not keep its meaning in the English translation) (Bourdieu 1965). The filmic approach to still photography as a social practice, of course, differs from Bourdieus textual approach. It washes ashore and makes visible the embodied knowledge envolved in the creation and performance of photographic reality. In this context I mean “performance” not as in “performing arts” but rather the concept of performativity in the cultural sciences that also has been fundamental for gender theory. Performativity (Butler 1990) refers to the normative and repetitive character of social practices – of bodily performances as well as of discursive constructions. In a performative understanding of language, language does not represent things whose reality exists beyond language, it is
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rather in the way language is used that reality is constructed. A person cannot be conceived regardless of the gender conditions in which he or she is implicated. From birth, a child is assigned a name that defines it as girl or boy and being repeatedly called by its name plays a part in the construction of its gender identity. Next to the performative aspects of language, there are bodily aspects that mark people as gendered beings: The way they occupy social space (Lefèbvre 1974) is marked by gendered patterns (Massey 1994). The way people cast looks and gazes, by dressing and using ornaments and gestures they activate embodied knowledge. This knowledge is often not verbalized and is rather part of an order “that we are caught in”. Recent works in the cultural sciences have underlined the relationship between gender knowledge and media knowledge. Embodied knowledge is a kind of knowledge that is not easily verbalized. Had Rouch just left behind written accounts about the Haoukas, based on observations, conversations and interviews, important aspects of the member’s possession by figures typical of the colonial power (the Governor, the locomotive driver, the “corporal of the guard” etc.) would not have been communicated. In studio photography customers pay to have their picture taken. This makes for a situation of compliance and complicity between photographer and clients. But this does not mean that every family member complies. Especially children resist, are unconfortable, afraid, unattentive, distracted etc. The knowledge how to act in front of the camera is inculcated into them starting from an age where they cannot even maintain a sitting pose by themselves. They learn “Stand up! Smile! Look into the camera!”. Not all knowledge about how to pose is verbalized, people refer to implicit knowledge, embodied knowledge. With my camera I entered the situation of this complicite relationship and profited of its intensity. Yet, as a filmmaker entering the situation, I am not part of this complicity. In this case, the photographer(s) in the studio supported the filming, communicating to their customers that my filming was okay. I asked the customers’ permission to film, talked to them in Arabic and explained what I was interested in. I encouraged them to ask questions about what I was doing and did not hide. Up to now, as I am writing this paper in May 2009, I have not had the chance to show the film to a Yemeni audience. This will be an important part of my envolvement with these family portraits. I explored this embodied knowledge by engaging in a filmic practice, by getting implicated through filming. This is a path or an approach to which Rouch’s work has given a lot of im-
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pulses and to which it is a rich source of inspiration. Rouch persued a politique d’auteur. The camera functions as an extension of the body and as a mechanical eye, but not an almighty eye, that can see everything as if unbound in space and time. The eye of the camera is grounded and linked to the author subject. „[F]ilming is never taken for granted, as if emerged from some invisible witness to the scene (Peña 2007:16)“. As a camera man Rouch avoided working with large teams and mostly worked with a local sound person. He did without a tripod, a way of working that links filmic perspective to bodily movement and human eye level. Rouch’s filmic style is characterized by elements of interactivity between him as a filmmaker behind the camera and the people portrayed. Rouch did not capture his friends from Niger or Mali in a romanticized state of “tradition” but took them serious as contemporaries. This struck as unfamiliar and new in the 1950s and 1960s, when African states had just reached liberty from colonial rule. Even today, when consciousness of the interdependency of all the people in the world has increased, filmic encounters “on eye level” do not go without saying. Battles over representation, about who has the power to represent whom are not outdated, on the contrary. Power issues tie into issues of visibility and invisibility, of possibilities to see, to show, to move, to access information as well as to conceal, to hide and to cover up. In a local context, Sanaa in this case, images, pictorial representations, looks (cast by one person to another) and even the sense of vision might have other meanings than those we are used to give to them in Central Europe. These issues are of great interest in the field of Visual Anthropology or Anthropology of the Senses (see e.g. Keifenheim 2000). At the same time, talking about photographic practice is talking about a field in constant change. Not only do technologies inspire innovations and new practices of picture making, but also does the global travel of images such as satellite television, advertisement, images on the world wide web inspire ways of using photography as a mode of self-assertion, stating difference or belonging. A photograph is never static. It is embedded in a flow of time. A Sanaani girl of eleven years of age who poses with her father, uncles, siblings and cousins on a portrait that is exposed in the living room might decide to take it off the wall a year later as she is now veiled. She might feel shy about her exposed picture, embarrassed about comments male visitors might make on her beauty. While photographs on the one hand reflect social values, roles and desires, on the other hand they have a role in defining social space, social roles, gender roles and the meaning of looks and gazes, thus reproducing and transforming the social world at the same time. 8
Visual images are a result of social practices of actors in a social world. In the way people use images and in their actions in which images are involved – e.g. having their picture taken – they refer to embodied knowledge, such as the use of social space, gender knowledge and ways of seeing that are culturally impregnated. This can be examined through documentary filmmaking understood as an interactive practice. Film highlights the performativity of social life, how social appearances as well as roles are learned, changed and improvized upon. In this vain, filming means entering the game of mutual reflections and references and of ruptures in the mutual awareness and understanding of the Other.
References: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1965. Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, Paris : Les Editions de Minuit. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York [u.a.]: Routledge. Colleyn, Jean-Paul. 1992. Jean Rouch, 54 ans sans trépied (entretien avec Jean Rouch). CinémAction n° 64 Demain le cinéma ethnographique?, pp. 40-50. Keifenheim, Barbara. 2000. Wege der Sinne. Wahrnehmung und Kunst bei den Kshinawa-Indianern Amazoniens. Frankfurt/M: Campus. Lefèbvre, Henri. 1974. La production de l'espace Paris: Anthropos. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mermier, Franck. 1997. Le cheick de la nuit: Sanaa: organisation des souks et societé, Arles : Sindbad. Morel, Alain. 1993. Ethnologie et cinéma: regards comparés. À propos de ‚Contes et comptes de la cour‘ d'Eliane de Latour (Interview mit Eliane de Latour). Terrain 21 octobre, 150-158. Peña, Richard. 2007. “Jean Rouch an the modernist moment in cinema”, In: William Rothman, ed. Jean Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film. Fasano di Brindisi: Schena Editore, pp. 13-16. Piault, Marc Henry. 2007. The "cine-transe" and the Reign of the Subject: Jean Rouch. In Memories of the Origins of Ethnographic Film, ed. Beate Engelbrecht, 363-375. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Sagne, Jean. 1994. Portraits en tout genre. L'atelier du photographe. In Nouvelle histoire de la photographie, ed. Michel Frizot, 102-129. Paris: Bordas. Feld, Steven (ed.). 2003. Ciné-Ethnography / Jean Rouch. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vom Bruck, Gabriele. 1997. “A house turned inside out. Inhabiting space in a Yemeni city”, dans Journal of Material Culture, 2(2), SAGE Publications, pp. 139-172.
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