Women Photographers: Expanding Agenda & Subverting Powers

by: Angela Varricchio , November 10, 2025

Introduction         

Women photographers have often faced numerous obstacles to publishing their works. Despite their significant contribution in the creative industries, they struggle to navigate and survive in the photography sector due to deeply rooted patriarchal constraints (Sullivan & Janis 1990). Photojournalism in particular remains a highly male-centric field. Myths of masculinity, valuing bravery, courage, and risk-taking, tend to dominate photojournalism schools and programmes (Assaf & Bock 2022). Racial biases also intertwine with gendered norms in the photo news ecology. The stereotype of the photojournalist as a white man is still present in the field (Somerstein 2020). Such traditional frameworks and expectations lead to several discrepancies in salary and career progression. Women photojournalists tend to receive lower pay and fewer assignments than their male colleagues (Hadland & Barnett 2018 b).

Conflict photographers have been subjected to juridical and social inequalities, and historically, the access of women photographers to war zones was often restricted (Allan 2019). Although the number of women photographers in conflict areas has increased slightly in the past decade, they still represent a minority in the field (Dursun, Yildiz & Bulut 2019). These factors contribute to rendering their work invisible or marginal in dominant media. However, in the last decade, academic studies have started to recognise the role played by Western women photographers in depicting World War One (Davies 2015; Sparham 2016; Khomami 2017; Meier 2017; British Women Photographers of the First World War 2018) and World War Two (Liptrott 2016; Strochlic 2018). However, this marks only the beginning of a necessary scholarly shift to disassemble the historiographic obscurity surrounding the works of women conflict photographers, which has persisted for years. To unveil the men-dominant systems of power, ‘historical studies of war photography need to be read against the grain in order to bring to the fore questions of gender and power’ (Allan 2019: 314). Following Allan’s observation and informed by an intersectional approach, I am to implement a more contemporary approach that addresses the power dynamics in this field. It is also worth mentioning that my personal experience as a conflict documentarist sparked my academic interest in this topic [1]. Often referring to my own career, I investigate how and to what extent the intertwining of gender and race deconstructs and reconfigures the dynamics of power that have long been entangled in the photographic coverage and ethics of conflict.

Theoretical Context

With the increasing access of women to news production, the impact of gender on the nature and scope of news has become central within scholarly inquiry. At one end of the spectrum, some theorists claim there is no correlation between gender and journalism inequalities. The increasing presence of women in high industry positions seems to challenge the presumed masculine hegemony in the field (Delano 2003). Others claim that gender still appears to be a highly influential factor of news reporting disparities, especially when intertwined with race (Chambers, Steiner & Fleming 2004).

As Hadland and Barnett note, photojournalism is profoundly affected by gender disproportion (2018a), caused by stereotypes deterring access to the field (Thomas 2007). A sexist culture associating photography and photo news with masculinity still orients customers’ and photo editors’ expectations (Dodd & Jackson 2019). Women who work as editorial photographers are denied ‘hard news’ assignments, assumed to be mere assistants of their men colleagues, become victims of sabotage by them and news organisations, or objects of sexual harassment by ‘editors, peers, sources, fixers, professors, and informal mentors’ (Somerstein 2020 14).

These gendered logics persist, especially in war photography. However, despite cultural deterrents and evident work imbalances, women photographers give an original contribution to conflict imagery, remapping its actors and values. Several theorists have demonstrated that their work proposes new narratives of war protagonists (Campbell & Critcher 2018; Krizic Roban 2020; Selejan 2020), reframe conventional understandings of conflict (Williams 1994), resist governmental propaganda (Gallagher 1998) and readdress the ethics of war (Chouliaraki 2013; Raymond 2017).

While the influence of gender on war photography, including its agenda and ethics, has gained significant attention in scholarly studies, few academics explore the intersection of gender and ethnicity to determine how it shapes the rhetoric and ideology of conflict photography. By triangulating qualitative methods and introducing new conceptual categories, I aim to address this analytical gap, hoping to open new lines of examination into the relationship between production disparities and the aesthetics and ethics of war photography.

Methods & Materials

To investigate how intersected experiences of gender and ethnicity impact the conflict agenda and ethics, I first examined my personal experiences of femininity and ethnicity intersected in the contexts of the southern Italian family and the Italian photo news and photography fields between the 1980s and 2008. To do so, I used Ellis and Bochner’s (2000) autoethnographic approach. Then, I explored how my experiences of marginalisation have developed and structured my own counter-patriarchal and counter-colonialist gazes on the war documentary project, The Julian-Dalmatian Question: A Denied Truth (2007-2008), which delved into the Julian-Dalmatian genocide. This conflict documentary is a long-term work which collects and combines anonymous or known photographers’ archive pieces and my own contemporary photographs of events, places, and protagonists gravitating around the genocide of the Julian-Dalmatians performed by Italian and Yugoslavian partisans.

Here, I will examine only 1 out of the 146 photographs of my documentary, depicting Licia Cossetto, the sister of Norma Cossetto, a Julian-Dalmatian woman raped by Italian partisans. To do so, I employed critical analysis, as proposed by Rose (2012), to focus on my conflict documentary to elaborate on how these experiences developed. Then, to understand how and to what extent the life and work experiences of women [2] and men photographers played a role in influencing photographic gazes on war, I focused on the Yemen war and searched for photographs of the conflict, and their authors’ biographies and opinions. To do so, I used the websites of photographers, photo agencies, newspapers and international photojournalism awards and collectives. I collected a total of 139 Yemen conflict images taken by 16 international photographers, 8 women and 8 men of different cultural heritages [3]. By employing a non-probability sampling method [4], I compared their experiences and photographs, individuating relevant reiterated visual trajectories. The same photographic patterns were detected when I compared the 42 Yemen conflict photographs, produced exclusively by the Yemeni women and men photographers [5]. In this essay, I focused only on the life and work experiences of some Yemeni men and women photographers. I compared Karrar Al-Moyyad’s and Amira Al Sharif’s photographic narratives of the theme of the Yemeni child, Khaled Al Thawr’s Amira Al Sharif’s and Amira Al-Sharif’s depictions of the Yemeni woman photographic narratives. Then, I employed constant comparison analysis [6] to classify the photographs of the international photographers into photographic contents. Finally, I investigated how the detected photographic narratives contrasted with or reiterated anti-hegemonic forms of powers embedded in the photographic narratives. To do so, I used Kress and van Leeuwen (1996)’s and Ledin and Machin (2018)’s theories to individuate war contents and tones and identify patriarchal [7] and colonialist ideologies. [8]

To create a systematic and coherent approach to the analysis of the Julian-Dalmatian question and Yemen conflict photographs, I introduced three overarching conceptual categories: the Mirror Process, Phoenix Rising from the War Ashes Effect, and War Ashes Effect. With the concept of Mirror Process, I referred to how photographers’ life and work conditions in societies and photography and photo news field mirror photographically their conflict productions, influencing their focus, contents and ideologies. I also employed the terms Phoenix Rising from the War Ashes Effect and War Ashes Effect [9] to refer to photographic positive or negative tones (or accents), respectively, depicting photographically conflict protagonists. I called War Ashes Effect the photographic narratives representing the actors in conflict areas through generally negative tones, constructing them as physically or emotionally impacted by conflict disasters. By contrast, I used Phoenix Rising from the War Ashes Effect to describe the photographic narrative of conflict subjects constructed via positive tones which emphasise their resilient ability to deal with and survive within war context, despite its physical and psychological impact. These two terms also work to individuate the hegemonic or counter-hegemonic ideological nature of the photographs.

Discussion

In this essay, I will demonstrate how the difference between women and men photographers’ life experiences is reflected into the aesthetic and ethics codes of their photographs. I will start by examining my struggles as a south-Italian woman and woman photographer within a highly racialised and gendered photography and photo news system. I will then demonstrate how my invisibility and marginalisation in southern Italian society moved my attention towards the Julian-Dalmatian conflict, a visual feature invisible or at the margin of the Italian media attention, offering counter-patriarchal visions of Julian-Dalmatian women protagonists. Then, I will proceed by focusing on the different conditions of Yemeni women and men and compare their photographs on the same thematic areas. I will demonstrate that similarly to my life and work on the Julian-Dalmatian tragedy, Yemeni women photographers’ invisibility and neglection in men-centric environments move their focus towards subjects of the war scene invisible in their Yemeni men colleagues’ agenda, developing increasingly more complex photographic perspectives dismantling the tradition of colonialist and patriarchal logics. By contrast, I will show how men photographers’ visibility in society and photo news systems shape their photographic attention towards protagonists already visible in mainstream media’s agenda, with a general tendency of reiterating hegemonic photographic actors of civilians in conflict areas.  

Growing up as a woman in the south of Italy in the 1980s, there were only binary choices. You could be a slut, a sexual predator, devouring the poor men victims by wearing make-up and a short skirt, or a nun, the pious reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, happy to marry as soon as menstruation comes, to later spend your life cooking for your hungry husband and children. I struggled to pigeonhole myself.

‘Are you married or engaged?’ This is the second classic question asked of a southern Italian woman, after learning her name. If you are unfortunate enough to be invited to a twelve-hour wedding ceremony, destiny usually does not offer a helping hand. It always puts you on the same table with at least one old woman. If you are more than twenty-five, and your answer is an innocent ‘No, I am not,’ you deliberately sign your death sentence. A predictable landslide of reactions follows. Ranging from a long sermon dotted with typically wrongly-attributed biblical references to a familiar harsh admonition, the grandmother’s tone is always apocalyptic: ‘If you do not move on, it will be too late.’ It does not really matter if you establish an intellectual and emotional connection with a man. After the age of twenty-five, you are authorised to go into the street, select the first man with a decent job, and marry him.  Like a pint of milk, if you do not hurry up, you will go sour.

I have always felt ‘out of place.’ After completing my degree, I went to Rome to study photojournalism with the dream of becoming a reporter, completely ignoring how the Italian photography field and profession were particularly gendered. Since I did not have any technical skills, I looked for a job as a photographic assistant. I applied for a position in Rome. During the interview, the photographer was crystal clear:

‘You have to move a lot of luggage with heavy equipment. I do not think that it is a job for a woman.’ I was not discouraged by his words. So, I proposed to him: ‘Today I will work for free. If my performance does not fulfil your requirements, you will not hire me, without wasting money, ok? ‘Ok,’ he answered. That day, he hired me. After months of working together, he confessed: ‘I have to admit that you are better than a man: you never complain. You do not even ask for a cigarette break!’

During art events, which I covered with my boss, I wore a suit and tie so I would be considered a real photographer. However, I always experienced the same predictable routine: ‘Good evening. Welcome, guys!’ Then the manager would ask my boss—as if I was an ornamental feature of the room: ‘Is she your assistant?’ ‘No,’ he would answer. ‘She is my colleague.’

I soon realised that my boss was a rare exception. Within the highly masculine newspaper hierarchy, the situation was even worse. I was accused of manipulating photographs. The allegation came from a state worker whose second job was directing the newspaper where I worked for free for six months. He was convinced that the vignette of my black and white photograph was a digital alteration, a result of excessive photo editing. None of my male colleagues had ever experienced anything like this. The next day he told me off and said what I had done was unethical. In my anger, I showed him a book on the history of photography. He apologised only when I showed him Edith Claire Gérin’s Le Passant du Pont des Arts (1949), which shares the same aesthetic features as my image.

There were also gendered iniquities in the educational environment. I was invited to take a long-term position teaching photojournalism for free. The school was owned by a group of retired men who labelled themselves ‘curators of photography’ on social media, without having a degree/postgraduate education in photography, or any experience in the photo news field. In response to my request to be paid for a six-month course, they answered, ‘You should do it for free—we are giving you visibility.’ Inexplicably, in addition to the visibility they gained, my male colleagues were also remunerated for a three-day workshop.

My southern Italian identity was the cause of professional and cultural stigmatisation and marginalisation in the Italian professional field. I also tried to find a job as a photojournalist in northern Italy. For 15 years, I sent my CV to studios, newspapers, and photo news agencies thousands of times. At 27 years old, I had a full Honours degree—BA (Hons) in Communication Science—two post-graduate specialisations (one of which was in Photojournalism), vast photographic experience from working at two studios, several photography courses which I had attended to expand my photographic knowledge, and six months of experience as a photojournalist.

I also had a wide portfolio of social and political features covered and ten national photographic awards [10]. Even so, although I sent off thousands of applications, I was not hired by photo news agencies or newspapers, which guaranteed permanent positions to male colleagues with less than half of my knowledge and training.

 

 

My lack of conformity to the gendered and racialised norms of the societal and familiar context in which I grew up and worked redirects the focus of my camera towards a group that was marginalised because it did not conform to the racialised concept of Italianity and the communist ideology predominant in that period in Italy, and it includes other actors excluded by the existing narrative because they, too, fail to conform to gendered norms. By a sort of Mirror Process transforming my struggles into anti-hegemonic photographic understandings of war, my conflict photography documentary has made visible some invisible actors, expanding the Julian-Dalmatian agenda. I realised later how, in resisting the patriarchal and racist values of the narrative of the Julian-Dalmatian question, I was fighting against the same forms of power I had lived first-hand in my life and job experiences as a southern Italian woman and female photojournalist. Being invisible within a society and the photo news field has equipped me with a sensitivity towards the painful stories of the marginal, the abandoned and the unseen. I could recognise that sense of frustration. I could feel that anger at injustices. They were also my frustration and my anger. In a sort of Mirror Process mirroring my life and my work focus and approach, as a southern Italian woman and photographer I could empathise with the story of Norma Cossetto, a Julian-Dalmatian victim of the genocide committed by Yugoslavian partisans in the Italian territories of Friuli Venezia Giulia, Istria, Fiume, and Dalmatia, which started with the fall of the fascist government in 1943. As a Julian-Dalmatian, Norma was a young woman from a north-eastern Italian ethnic minority group, who was tortured, raped and killed by a group of partisans in 1943 because she was the daughter of a fascist leader. The genocide of Julian-Dalmatians started with the spread of the news of the fall of fascism in 1943, after which the political frictions in the region of Friuli Venezia-Giulia escalated into a series of violent attacks on Julian-Dalmatian fascists or presumed fascists carried out by Tito’s Yugoslavian partisans, often with the collaboration of Italian partisans.

Throughout my investigation of Norma’s story, I discovered that the Julian-Dalmatian question was almost invisible in Italian media accounts, obscured by the historic and photojournalistic collective Italian memory, because it involved fascists. Like me, they were made invisible. Moreover, the visual record of their torture and slaughter was also incomplete and fragmented. I wanted to counter the media injustice suffered by the Julian-Dalmatians by giving them the visibility they did not have. I therefore decided to produce a photographic documentary to make their story visible.

I wanted to represent the complexity of the various events of the Julian-Dalmatian question. Before I started my project, its photographic narrative was constituted by images of infoibati’ bodies extracted by some foibe. [11] Through my photography documentary, I reconstructed the three strands epitomising the Julian-Dalmatian events: the infoibamento [12] (Le vittime delle foibe n.d.; Rumici 2002; Pupo & Spazzali 2003); the internment in the gulag [13] and the exodus [14]. I added photographs of a former Yugoslavian gulag, Borovnica, a survivor of the gulag, a survivor of the infoibamento, two ex-Yugoslav and Italian foibe, several first- and second-generation exiles, and two Centres of Gathering for Refugees located in many Italian regions (Rocchi 1990; Cattaruzza 2000; Valdevit 2004).

Also, the scarce and fragmented Julian-Dalmatian photographic agenda, rarely circulated within Italian media, was built mainly around the visibility of men protagonists, following the conventions of conflict iconography and erasing visually the violence suffered by women and children in war contexts (Perlmutter, 1999). With the exception of Norma’s portrait, the Julian-Dalmatian women protagonists as infoibate, siblings of infoibati and internees and exiles were completely absent from the Italian media’s agenda. I wanted to construct their visibility. I wanted to show that the conflict actors of war are also women acting out the military scenario, witnessing, not just mourning the loss of their siblings with dignified strength and resilience. I therefore decided to portray Norma Cossetto’s sister, Licia (Fig. 1), to witness her existence as a sibling of a raped woman, thrown into a foiba. I asked Licia to pose with images of her sister Norma and her father Giuseppe, who was also an infoibato. She instinctively held the two photographs at the level of her heart. I positioned Licia at the centre of the photograph in the living room of her house and framed her half-length. I wanted to metaphorically recentre the war on the existence of women as courageous and resilient protagonists of conflict narratives and to subvert the tropes of women in conflict contexts narrated as passive subjects (Zarzycka, 2016). I took several shots and selected the portrait (Fig. 1) in which her fierceness was the most evident. Not devoured by pain and desperation, Licia stands proudly and resiliently in front of the camera, preserving the memory of the Julian-Dalmatian victims and, via synecdoche, for long time ignored by Italian public opinion and denied by some historians and Italian media in general [15]. As a Phoenix, she was resurrecting from her pain and trauma. In my photographic narrative, I was unconsciously using what I recognised later to be the Phoenix from the Ashes Effect’s positive tones.

When I focused on the Yemen conflict production of the 16 international war men and women photographers of different ethnicities and heritages, I found this same visual pattern in the work of the 8 international women photojournalists, understanding that it was shaped by their struggles in patriarchal societies and photo news ecology. I divided the photographs of the two groups into a total of 10 thematic areas: the Yemeni boy, Yemeni girl, woman, man, Yemen, animals, Western intergovernmental institutions in Yemen, African refugees in Africa, and Yemeni migrants in Africa. However, I noticed that while the first 8 themes were covered by women and men photographers, the last two were introduced by the women alone. So, there was a connection between the invisibility in men-dominant societies and visual journalism and the contents of their agenda. Their invisibility in the two systems readdressed their camera towards subjects of the war scene invisible in the men photographers’ agenda. The same pattern emerged also when I focused and compared the Yemeni women and men photographers’ lives and war productions. I categorised their photographs into a total of 5 contents: the Yemeni boy, Yemeni girl, woman, man, Yemen and animals. While the first 4 themes were equally covered, the last one was introduced by Yemeni women photographers alone. Amira Al-Sharif’s photograph of the boy playing with the pigeon (Fig. 3), is an example of Yemeni women photographers introducing animalhood as a new actor of the photographic scene (Fig. 3), invisible within the Yemeni men photographers’ agenda. For this reason, via a Mirror Process, connecting life and photographic understandings of war realities and subjects, the men photographers’ high visibility within patriarchal societies and photo news ecologies shapes a photographic attention for conflict subjects already visible within mainstream media’s conflict coverage. By contrast, women photographers’ invisibility moves the photographic focus towards actors invisible in their men counterparts’ coverage.

Through the Mirror Process connecting life and photographic understandings, men photographers’ privileged life and work conditions construct photographic gazes on conflict, reiterating systems of privileges, translated into objectified visions of young civilians as passive actors of the war context, at the bottom of the hierarchy of power. Even though with some slightly different peculiarities, their power translates photographically into framing (visually and ideologically) the actors of the Yemeni war as oppressed victims. In fact, frames of reality where photographers benefit from power transform into photographic frames where a chain of abuses is visually perpetrated.

Particularly evident in the production of Yemeni men photographers, it consists of portraying civilians as physically or emotionally impacted by the consequences of conflict. These perspectives, built via the repetition of negative categories and tones I call the War Ashes Effect, work as support of hegemonic views on civilians. The War Ashes photographic narratives effect traps their objectified gazes on war protagonists, narrated as hopelessly at the mercy of the ineluctable spiral of the conflict, death and pain of the disaster of war.

Due to its deeply rooted gendered roles (Yemeni Feminist Movement 2020), Yemen has been positioned as ‘[o]ne of the Worst Places in the World to be a Woman’ (One of the Worst Places in the World to be a Woman, 2019) in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for 13 consecutive years. A Yemeni woman reports the painful sense of objectification and alienation created by her man-centric culture, exacerbated by the beginning of the conflict:

By God, I am broken from the inside. It’s not normal, I don’t feel like a human being. I can’t breathe properly like other human beings. We suffer from the forced niqab, child marriage, divorce shame, domestic violence and honour killings. I don’t know … as if we are aliens. They [her male family members] have to oppress us, and we have to stay oppressed—like a puppet controlled by strings. (Author’s emphases) (Yemeni Feminist Movement 2020)

 

 

Within this highly sexist environment, Yemeni men photographers thrive and exert many forms of power at different levels of society, shaping objectifying and hegemonic representations of civilians. By analysing the visual rhetoric of their extensive work on the Yemen war, I have identified a massive and consistent use of the War Ashes Effect to promote colonialist and patriarchal views on conflict actors.

One exemplar is the Yemeni man photographer Al-Moyyad’s narrative of a Yemeni child suffering malnutrition (Fig. 2). The use of negative tones photographically constructs a colonialist view of Yemeni minors, particularly boys. Commissioned by the Western ICRC (the International Committee of the Red Cross), his narrative reiterates understandings of children as victims of violence constantly circulated by mainstream media, emphasising the direct or indirect consequences of war disasters (Zarzycka 2016), de-dignifying refugees (Clark-Kazak 2009) and marginalised subjects (Millar 2016; Dencik and Allan 2017). With dishevelled hair and sitting half naked on the multicoloured blanket of a hospital bed, this child’s stomach is swollen, his arms are skeletal, his legs slim, and his mouth is covered by a whitish powder, possibly a food supplement. His facial expression conveys sadness, pain and disorientation. His poor physical condition symbolises the starvation of the most vulnerable members of Yemeni society. Moreover, Yemen is portrayed as being highly impacted by hunger as a consequence or aggravating element of conflict disasters. The caption explains that the child had to travel a long way to reach the hospital, contributing to a depiction of the Middle Eastern country as infrastructurally underdeveloped. While Yemen is photographically understood as a place of death and desperation, westerners are portrayed as positive actors in the disasters of the Yemeni war through the use of sophisticated visual codes.

On the right of the photographic space, an almost invisible medic’s apron emerges, indicating that a doctor or a nurse is providing food support, the traces of which are visible on the child’s mouth. The apron alludes metaphorically to the hospital in which the baby is recovering. This photographic element embodies the ICRC support, and via synecdoche, western institutions (and westerners) as benevolent actors offering medical aid to end the starvation of Yemeni children. Western countries appear as game changers of the war drama, the sole dei ex machina able to resolve the catastrophic situation of civilians. These diametrically opposed views of Yemen, Yemenis and Western presence function orientalistically to hide some western countries’ economic interest in the Arabian Peninsula. For example, it omits the United States’ will to expand its economic power that the area (United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk Announces Agreement with Gulf Cooperation Council to Strengthen Economic Ties, Expand Trade and Investment Relationship 2012).

 

 

When framing the same content, women photographers tend to resist these colonialist tropes. Amira Al-Sharif’s narrative of the Yemeni child is an example. The oppressive gendered conditions are the panorama within which Al-Sharif and other Yemeni women photographers live, and towards which they develop their resilience. Born in Saudi Arabia and growing up in Yemen, Al-Sharif’s personal struggles against injustices in that country have shaped counter-hierarchical lenses on the reality of war and its actors, resonating visually and ideologically with her resistance. Grant winner, visual researcher, teacher and educator (6×6 Asia Talent: Amira Al-Sharif, Yemen n.d.), her photographic focus on women’s strength is encapsulated in Yemeni Women with an Enduring Spirit, a long-term documentary project which captures the courageous role played by Yemeni women within their communities (ICORN, 2019). Her interest in the fighting spirit of Socotra women—part of this project—mirrors her ability to survive within the prohibitive conditions of Yemeni society. Rather than stereotypically framing civilians as victims of conflict violence, she portrays them as active agents of resistance to it, proactive protagonists of their own destiny.

One example is her narrative of a smiling Yemeni boy playing with a pigeon in a domestic environment (Fig. 3); offering a counter-colonialist gaze the Yemeni boy completely reverses Al-Moyyad’s narrative (Fig. 2). Almost at the centre of the image, slightly out of focus, a smiling young Yemeni boy, wearing a dark grey shirt with yellow strips, seems to be emerging from a cubbyhole. With its head out of the frame, a pigeon is flying in the room, playing with the boy. The bond with the pigeon produces and maintains the mental stability of the boy, counterposed by the war’s unpredictability. Behind the boy, a variety of objects are arrayed on a concrete shelf. The photographs of natural environments are discoloured by light but in good condition, while the image of a soldier is damaged. The contrast between the condition of the photographs suggests the detachment of the boy’s family from the effects of war. It sets in opposition soldier-hood and Nature, war and non-war, peace and trauma [16]. The young boy is narrated as physically healthy and psychologically serene via the use of the positive photographic tones I previously called Phoenix Rising from the Ashes Effects. Opposing Al-Moyyad’s cliché of the starving child as a colonialist narrative of young civilians as victims of the consequences of conflict, Al-Sharif’s boy thrives in the temporary aftermath of Middle Eastern countries, not because of Western support, but rather because of his pet (and within a domestic environment). They both function practically and metaphorical as allies, creating a mechanism of the emotional and psychological happiness and tranquillity of young minors within a war context, so making redundant the occidental presence or support. Al Sharif points out that this refusal of negative stereotype reiteration has a specific raison d’être: it serves to increase the audience’s interest in conflict affairs. By ‘[c]elebrating rather than stereotyp[ing] these subjects’ (Amira Al-Sharif n.d.), her aim is to keep the readers’ attention on the protagonists of war. To Al-Sharif, ‘[p]eople communicate to strength. To hope. To life. To blooming. To resilience. People want light.’ In fact, she states, showing bravery in conflict disasters is a way of ‘short-circuit[ing] the impulse to look away’ (in Blackmore 2019).

Similar trajectories among Yemeni women and men photographers emerge when comparing the visual constructions of Yemeni womanhood. Even in the rare cases in which male photographers also use anti-hegemonic structures to depict the protagonists of conflict, they are weaker and less sophisticated than their female counterparts. An example of this pattern is offered by Al Thawr’s depiction of Yemeni women selling snacks to earn money (Fig. 4) and Al-Sharif’s Yemeni woman selling gasoline (Fig. 5). In the foreground of Al Thawr’s image, the food vendors wear multicoloured vests and sit on the dirty road under a beach with a young child. In Al-Sharif’s image, red-veiled woman sells bottles of gasoline arranged on a wooden table, watching a pink-veiled younger woman, perhaps a potential customer, accompanied by a child. In the middle of the scene, an elderly man wearing a cyan shirt, watches the young lady. The fact that he wears a green patterned tablecloth sarong round his waist and is close to the vendor leads the viewer to think that he may be the gasoline seller’s husband. His body position and facial expression suggest an interest and attentive wait for the customer’s answer. The caption informs us that gasoline prices are unaffordable to millions of civilians across Yemen. This means that the seller is able to make a considerable profit.

The two shots seem to present similar counter-patriarchal presentations of Yemeni women. Involved in commercial activities, a man’s prerogative in the tradition of Yemeni society, women seem to be establishing a financial independence. However, a deeper analysis shows Al Thawr’s major conformity to patriarchal visions which Al-Sharif’s construction refuses. Firstly, in Al Thawr’s image the absence of customers signifies a little or no profit. Compared to Al-Sharif’s picture, his women are photographically depicted as less successful, and less economically independent than Al-Sharif’s women. Consequently, while he reiterates a photographic vision of womanhood as at the mercy of an economic collapse caused by conflict, Al-Sharif presents a view of a woman surviving economically despite the negative consequences of war.

 

 

 

 

Secondly, unlike Al Thawr’s reiteration of orientalist tropes, Al-Sharif offers a counter-ethnocentric understanding of Yemeni women and the micro-economy as thriving amidst or despite the instability of conflict. The precariousness of the hygienic conditions for food storage and the disorganised disposal of the packed food portrays the Yemeni woman as a novice, lacking knowledge and competence in relation to hand-made meal preservation and vending, and allude to the hazards or future failure of their enterprise. Strongly mirroring patriarchal ideas of women’s lack of ability and knowledge to manage commercial activities, Al Thawr’s photograph shows that women’s efforts to survive the economic collapse fails miserably. Although packed in plastic bags, their food is not stored in portable refrigerators, and is touched without wearing gloves, left on the soil and rocks of the road highly exposed to viruses and bacteria (see the right of the frame), or at risk of heat-related damage due to holes in the stitched textile of the parasol (centre of the frame), hugely increasing the probability of food poisoning. Also, in that it is not arranged on a table but left on the pavement, the food is presented in a highly chaotic and unattractive way, reducing the probability that it will catch the attention of potential customers.

Conversely, Al-Sharif’s vendor of gasoline bottles is portrayed as an expert. She is aware of her items’ characteristics and takes care to prevent accidents. She knows what she is doing and takes all the recommended measures to avoid risks. She is aware that as a highly inflammable liquid, gasoline must be stored in tightly sealed fuel cans with a capacity of five gallons or less, with some room in the container to allow the liquid to expand, and it must be kept away from potential heat sources (Exxon Mobil n.d.). She pours the gasoline into cans whose size does not exceed five gallons. The empty bottle on her left is the evidence of this careful measurement. Also, the bottles containing gasoline displayed on the table are not completely full, leaving space for the liquid to expand. All the bottles have plastic caps to prevent any leakage or evaporation. The scene was shot after twilight—the sunlight is behind the mountain in the background of the shot, illuminating the contours of its bluish silhouette—in other words, at a time when the temperature decreases. This also suggests that the woman is aware of the risk of exposing gasoline to high temperatures. To avoid this, she sets up her little stall when the sun has already gone down. Also, the fact that the bottles are displayed on a table rather than on the ground, and therefore at a safe distance from car exhausts and other sources of heat (cigarettes, charcoal, etc.) also demonstrates her understanding of the properties of gasoline and the risks it can pose. Her facial expression, relaxed and tranquil, underlines this awareness. While Al Thawr’s shot frames the Sanaa area as economically impacted by war, thus foreshadowing further economic difficulties for small individual enterprises, Al-Sharif’s Aden market is shown as thriving with its multiplicity of microenterprises. This aspect is also accentuated by the presence of other traders behind the gasoline vendor. It amplifies the positive narrative of Yemeni woman constructed by Al-Sharif, in contrast to the lack of any fellow vendors in Al Thawr’s photograph. The two shots create totally different narratives: while Al Thawr’s War Ashes Effect emphasises the solitary condition of women vendors, which oozes failure, struggle and economic instability, Al-Sharif’s Phoenix Rising from the Ashes Effect shows women’s success, resilience, and ability to flourish within the uncertainties brought about by conflict. More prominent in the work of Yemeni women photographers and almost absent in that of their male colleagues, this frame embodies the renaissance of civilians at the social, political and economic level in a time of war. These photographic codes offer innovatively counter-colonialist gazes on Yemeni womanhood. Rather than narrating women as trapped in the roles of ‘crying Madonnas,’ mourning the loss of their siblings (Zarzycka, 2016) or desperately fleeing war disasters, Al-Sharif proposes a perspective of women as successful agents of economic stability, flourishing during a time of war, without occidental support in any form (be it military or civic) or of organisations (governmental or non-governmental ones), absent in the picture. At the same time, rather than being stereotypically seen as chaotic, devastated or collapsed, Yemen is as a stable and economically thriving country in which women undertake activities autonomously, again without western actors’ support.

Another narrative of Yemeni women, one which opposes the objectification of colonialist views, is offered by Hanan Ishaq through the use of more conceptual aesthetics. Ishaq is a photographer who was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in Yemen (Ishaq 2021: 2). Her life and her work have been affected by painful experiences of marginalisation and stigmatisation. During our interview, she explained to me that the conditions of photographers in Yemen are highly restrictive. Owning a camera is ‘taboo’ (Ishaq 2021: 12): a permit must be granted by a number of governmental and religious authorities, and often the equipment is confiscated on the street (Ishaq 2021: 12). The stigmatisation is even worse for women photographers because of the patriarchal nature of Yemeni society. She says that ‘[for a woman,] carrying a camera is worse than having a gun’ (Ishaq 2021: 15). Moreover, since the beginning of the conflict, her North Yemeni ethnicity has been problematic. Outside the borders of Yemen, she sees it as a ‘stamp of shame’ (Ishaq 2021: 9), making her feel ‘foreign’ (Ishaq 2021: 9), a sort of outsider, because of the strong stigmatisation of war refugees.

These painful experiences came on top of some suffering which started before the conflict and have a significant influence on her photographic work. When I asked her to explain to me her interest in conflict photography, she admitted that she had faced several ‘barriers’ in her life. She emphasised how her photographic narratives of war metaphorically and materially mirrored her inner struggles and her persistent resistance to them (Ishaq 2021: 12):

I’ve always been, my life has been symbolised a lot by barriers even before. So, with the war coming in and the conflict, more barriers were rising and surrounding me. So, it somehow put me in a position where the conflicts on the outside started to mirror the internal war that was going on within myself. So, there was, I was in a state of bombardment and at the same time resistance, there was a lot of resistance. (Author’s emphasis) (Ishaq 2021: 12)

 

 

By framing her work as a subjective understanding of war, Ishaq explains that it represents a form of ‘empowerment’ (Ishaq 2021: 12), transposing her resistance to challenges into her photographs (Ishaq 2021: 5):

So, it’s being challenged on the existential level because life doesn’t look the same anymore … And I think it’s a means of making sense of things by being in the situation and then translating this through photography or art and visual art in general’ (Author’s emphasis).

Her ability to survive the brutalities of conflict is embodied in her double-exposed self-portrait (Fig. 6). Ishaq poses at the centre of the photograph, between rail tracks on the outskirts of an unidentified city. Her Phoenix from the Ashes Effect is embodied in her double presence. The first Ishaq, wearing a pink scarf, stands still, her arms hanging by her sides, while the second wears a light blue scarf and is crouched on the autumnal grass, holding a white bag in her right hand. The standing Ishaq is a static and passive figure, while the crouching Ishaq is moving her hands to become a dynamic and active actor of and within the devastating psychological effects of war. This visual duality of Ishaq’s body suggests a transformation of the photographer’s identity and, via synecdoche, of Yemeni woman: from the stillness of passive acceptance of the catastrophic physical and psychological impact of war to the dynamism of resilient re-action to the damage its consequences. Also, the chromatic language of the shot contributes to the construction of the women identity’s metamorphosis, opposing the vivid saturation of the green of the grass to the desaturated colour of the urban environment. These photographic categories subvert the tropes of pain attributed to women in war zones by constructing the courageous renaissance of Ishaq from the trauma of conflict. Since the standing Ishaq is in sharper focus than her alter ego on the grass, the metaphorical action of standing is stronger than being crouched on the metaphorical ‘terrain’ of conflict trauma. This rebirth is an autonomous act which occurs without the presence or support of any occidental actors, dismantling the traditions of ethnocentric understandings of women in contexts of war. While conventionally Western actors, via the presence of institutions or military interventions, are photographically framed as the only actors able to establish conditions of physical and psychological stability, in Ishaq’s photograph her renaissance occurs without the presence of Western subjects and removed from their institutional places. Her distance from war trauma is framed and constructed in a Middle Eastern space, no longer battered by chaos and instability, however temporary peace may prove.

Conclusions

By focusing on the examination of my documentary narrative about the Julian-Dalmatian question and the women photographers’ Yemen conflict work, my study has demonstrated how the structural disparities experienced by women photographers in societies and the photographic industry shape several counter-hegemonic understandings of conflict actors and territories. I have elaborated how, by a Mirror Process between my life and work experiences, exclusion from and stigmatisation within a patriarchal society and the north Italian man-centred photo and photojournalism news field oriented my interest towards the events of the Julian-Dalmatian ethnic minority, marginalised by the Italian mainstream press. The struggles I experienced shaped the photographic representations of the Julian-Dalmatian documentary by expanding its agenda, and moved the focus towards women actors marginalised by the mainstream media’s narratives. They also developed counter-patriarchal narratives of womanhood, shifting their visual representations from absent or passive to present and active witnesses of the Julian-Dalmatian question.

Similar trajectories emerged from the analysis of women photographers’ lives and jobs, and their depictions of the Yemeni conflict when compared with those of their male colleagues. In the same way my invisibility moved my photographic attention towards invisible strains and subjects of the Julian-Dalmatian question, expanding its agenda, women photographers’ invisibility moved their cameras’ focus on invisible actors of the Yemeni war, ones completely absent in their male counterparts’ agenda. Female war photographers produced narratives characterised by a stronger and more sophisticated subversion of hegemonic forms of power. Women photographers’ innovative visions reveal the bravery of the protagonists of conflict and their resilient joie de vivre, which is a victory in the face of physical and psychological trauma and the uncertainties of war’s catastrophes, empowering traditionally de-dignified actors in war scenes. By transforming conflict actors from passive objects of pain, subjugation, and slavery to active subjects of freedom and enfranchisement, women’s conflict imagery embodies ‘a critical mirror of international affairs … giving form to the intangibilities of war’ (Kennedy 2015: 169). Their works trigger the audience’s understanding of ‘forms of social and state power … embedded in the frame’ (Butler 2009: 72), creating new, resilient cultural and visual terrains for ethical struggles. For this reason, the photojournalistic invisibility of women in the field of conflict represents a phenomenon which ‘will inevitably impact on the scope of photojournalism and on the range of narratives it presents, on the representation of the marginalised, on accessing the vulnerable and will present fewer opportunities for women to counter the prevailing gaze that, more often than not, sees them as objectified or depoliticised’ (Hadland & Barnett 2018a).

This essay has shown a connection between intersected gender and ethnicity struggles and the formation of the contents and ideologies of conflict photography. It prompts further reflections on the impact of other intersecting variables of the power matrix, which may influence the aesthetics and ethics of conflict photography. It may open new cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches to the study of war photography and new horizons for understanding the formation of conflict photographic narratives and ideologies.

 Notes: 

[1] In 2007, I started a war photography documentary, The Julian-Dalmatian Question: The Denied Truth (2007-2008), about a post-fascist conflict during which an Italian ethnic minority, the Julian-Dalmatians, was killed. In 2008, I found a photo editor of a high-profile Italian left-wing newspaper who seemed interested in buying some photographs of the documentary. Although receiving several compliments about the quality of the documentary, during our meeting, he defined my work as ‘unpublishable,’ because it concerned a story ‘too old’ for the Italian audience of 2008. I understood later that the reason was merely political: the documentary revealed crimes that the Italian partisans and the left-wing party of Palmiro Togliatti committed with the collaboration of the partisans of the Yugoslav communist dictator Josip Broz Tito. The partisans killed several Julian-Dalmatians from 1943 to 1957 because of their fascist ideologies. So, my work represented a strong ‘J’accuse’ towards proponents of the left-wing ideology. My case was emblematic of the expectations, norms and standards of visibility and invisibility of conflict gazes set by the highly patriarchal Italian photo news sector. I realised that I shared this invisibility and marginalisation under different forms with several women photographers, particularly within the photo news field. Their works are often marginalised or erased by the male-dominated control of the media ecology, because they offer visions distant from expected cultural standards (Moore 2013).

[2] Aware of the fact that cultural revolutions start from language shifts, I use the terminology ‘men photographers’ rather than ‘male photographers’ (and more generally ‘men’ as an adjective) to allude to the complexity of the experience of masculinity which cannot be shaped by or associated to gender-sex, since it depends on multifaceted interactions of societal and individual factors. With a similar intent, I preferred the terminology ‘women photographers’ to ‘female photographers’ (and more generally, I use ‘women’ as an adjective) to explore the intersected construction of femininity within specific spatial and temporal contexts, which cannot be clearly associated with genitalia.

[3] The eight men photographers are: the brown Yemeni Ali Al Sonidar, Ahmad Al Basha, Karrar Al-Moayyad, Abdallah Al Jaradir, Khaled Al Thawr, and Saleh Bahlais, an anonymous photographer and the white British Giles Clarke. The eight women photographers are: the white American Stephanie Sinclair, the brown Egyptian Canadian Nariman El-Mofty, the white British Olivia Arthur and Alixandra Fazzina, the white French Véronique de Viguerie, the brown Yemeni Eman Al Awami and the brown Yemeni Hanan Ishaq.

[4] I employed this method for two reasons. Firstly, because as a conflict at the margins of media exposure, the Yemen war is already invisible. Since finding photographs of the conflict is difficult, doing a selection of photographs would have an impact on their already scarce availability. Secondly, and most importantly, exploring all the collected photographs without adopting selection criteria would allow me to avoid any potential personal bias during the process of data collection, interfering with the analysis of their aesthetics. This sampling method should therefore reduce the probability of distorting the academic understanding of how women and men photographers narrate conflict and its protagonists differently or similarly.

[5] I compared 13 photographs by the six Yemeni men authors (Ali Al Sonidar, Ahmad Al Basha, Karrar Al-Moayyad, Abdallah Al Jaradir, Khaled Al Thawr and Saleh Bahlais) and 29 images by the three women photographers (Amira Al-Sharif, Eman Al Awami and Hanan Ishaq).

[6] I coded the photographs of the Yemen war to identify common photographic patterns. As a coding category for the subjects portrayed, I differentiated humans from animals. As sub-coding categories for human subjects, I used cross-ethnicity, gender, age, status and the location in which the conflict subjects act. For example, I differentiated Yemeni civilians acting in Yemen according to age and gender, dividing the photographs into the themes of Yemeni woman, man, girl and boy.

[7] To evaluate the deconstruction or reiteration of the patriarchal logics of conflict imagery, I examined the representation of masculinity and femininity of all the conflict protagonists. To do so, I considered whether men’s and women’s bodies were narrated passively or actively and associated with classical patriarchal roles (domestic duties and child and animal care for women; jobs and military duties for men).

[8] To explore whether and how a photograph dismantles or deconstructs ethnocentric forms of power, I examined how photographic narratives constructed understandings of Yemeni civilians as impacted by war-related material or psychological damage, as dependent on or independent of Western institutions, and acting passively or actively. In the analysis of Yemen, I considered the material aspects of the territories, if impacted negatively or positively.

[9] I used these terms to create a connection between the analysis of the photographic languages and techniques of the collected photographs and the speculation about the patriarchal, colonialist, and colonialist values (and their opposite) embedded in the photographs.

[10] I have won the following awards:

• Bronze award in the Reportage category. Orvieto Fotografia Professional Photography Awards. Italy. 2008
• Bronze award in the Reportage category. Orvieto Fotografia Professional Photography Awards. Italy. 2009
• Bronze award in the Open Photography category. Orvieto Fotografia Professional Photography Award. Italy. 2009
• Honourable mention in the Travel and Ethnicity category. Premio fotografico 2009 Tau Visual. Italy. 2009
• Web gallery finalist. National Geographic Italian Contest. Italy. 2010
• Second place in the Photography category. Intimalens Ethnographic Film Festival. Italy. 2012
• Finalist. Leica Italia Award Contest. Italy. 2013
• Bronze award in the Reportage category. Fiof Awards Nikon Photo Contest. Italy. 2014
• Bronze award in the Storytelling category. Fiof Awards Nikon Photo Contest. Italy. 2014
• Finalist. Wide Foundation Documentary Photography Award. Sweden. 2015
• Second place in the Story category. Fiof Awards. Fiipa. Italy. 2016
• Honourable mention in the People category. Monochrome Award. International award. 2016.
• Selected in the Storyboard category. Siena International Photo Award. 2016.
• Selected in the Street Photography category. Magnum Photography Awards 2016. 2016
• Selected in the Storyboard category by the photo editors. Siena International Photo Award. 2016
• Selected in the Street Photography category. Lensculture Photo Contest. 2016
• Finalist in the Travel category. Aspa -Alghero Street Photography Awards. 2018
• Honourable mention. 2020 Tokyo International Foto Awards. 2020
• Finalist. Women Street Photography Award. 2022
• Spotlight. Leica Women Foto Project in collaboration with Leica Women Foto Project. Project. 2023
• Honourable Mention in the Photojournalism-Photo Essay category of Analog Spark Awards. 2024
• Finalist. Women Street Photographers Artist Residency. 2024.

[11] A foiba is a deep vertical chasm common in the northeastern Italian mountains, and typical of the Karst landscape.

[12] The infoibamento is the act of throwing one or more chained Julian-Dalmatian prisoners, with hands and feet bound, into a foiba after shooting the first of the group.

[13] The internment in the Yugoslavian gulag (working camps) consisted of the political indoctrination and torture of internees.

[14] The exodus from the Julian-Dalmatian territories was a slow and painful abandonment of properties and siblings, starting with the Treaty of Peace of 1947, when part of Friuli Venezia-Giulia became a Yugoslavian territory and several assets (particularly dwellings) of Julian-Dalmatians became the property of the Yugoslavian government.

[15] In the Italian mediatic and historic scenario, in fact, the memory of the Julian-Dalmatian question has been erased for ideological reasons, to hide some Italian partisans’ murders that would have contributed to dismantling the myth of the Resistenza. The tendency to totally obscure or highly marginalise the Julian-Dalmatian question has persisted for a long time. Only in the late 1990s did the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, designate the 10th of February as a ‘Day of Memory’ to honour and commemorate the Julian-Dalmatian victims of the partisans, as the media gradually gave more attention to the Julian-Dalmatian tragedy.

[16] This opposition is emphasised by the photographic codes narrating the boy and the house’s objects. The slight fuzziness of the boy’s face symbolises a joyful approach to life made unstable by threats of conflict materialising outside the house walls. By contrast, the series of objects on the concrete shelf and the pictures on the wall are in sharp focus. This dynamic moves the observer’s attention towards the contrast between the tranquillity created by the family’s strong love for its genealogical roots and the fear of death and destruction represented by the portrait of the serviceman that has deteriorated over time because it has not been cared for by the family.