The Repercussions by Catherine Hall

Author:Catherine Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books

Twenty-Nine

I spent a long time looking at the images of Aisha Bibi, the girl with no nose, trying to plan my photo shoot with Leila. I used to love the speed of frontline photography, the rawness of it, the lack of time to set it up. When a situation explodes in front of you, you start to shoot, and keep going until the violence has stopped or it’s too dangerous to continue. You’re shooting under the influence of adrenalin, not sure of what you’re going to get. Portraiture is the opposite: constructed, considered and slow, and for a long time I didn’t want to do it. I’ve had to work out how to do it truthfully, but in a way that makes it interesting. I knew the shoot with Leila would be a tricky one, partly because of how to make it different from the pictures of Aisha Bibi, but also because I didn’t know how to square it ethically in my head.

On the day of the shoot, Faisal had a meeting at the hospital and couldn’t stay.

“I trust you, Jo,” he said as he left. “Look after her.”

When he had gone, Sonia brought tea. As we sat drinking it, I looked around the room. There was one window, shielded by a piece of muslin that filtered the harsh sun.

“We need light,” I said, going over to it and lifting a corner of the cloth. “Perhaps we could take away the curtain.”

Leila blinked and said something, her voice urgent.

“She doesn’t want you to do that,” Rashida said. “She doesn’t want people to see her.”

“Of course,” I said quickly. “We’ll work with the light we have.”

“Leila’s asking if she should stand or sit,” Rashida said.

I’d been wondering the same thing. There wasn’t much in the room apart from a few cushions to sit on and, on the walls, the photographs that I’d taken when I first met the family in 2001. I knew that everything in the shot would mean something later on – a cooking pot could become a cliché, a hairbrush might take on too much significance.

Do you remember that book, put together by a German photographer, of those pictures of Taliban soldiers taken in backstreet Kandahar photo studios? They posed, the warriors, hand in hand – extraordinary, dreamy, holding flowers, guns, mobile phones – in front of posters of Swiss chalets, riverboats, suburban American houses, wearing thick black eye make-up. The soldiers on the front line in Khoje Bahauddin had worn mascara too, to ward off the evil eye. I’d tried to sell my photographs of them to the newspapers, but no one took them. I guessed they didn’t want the troops we were backing to look effeminate. These soldiers seemed not to care. They knew that photography was banned. They knew that homosexuality was forbidden and what could happen if they were discovered, that they could end up standing in front of a wall while a bulldozer pushed down stones to crush them to death. Yet, they

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.