Clea Kahn, humanitarian lead for ListenH, writes about her experience of delivering a participatory photography project in Pakistan, following attendance at a PhotoVoice training course.
As an enthusiastic but very amateur photographer, it had not occurred to me to use photography as a research tool until I heard about it by chance from someone who had attended a PhotoVoice training. The methodology seemed an excellent fit with the ListenH project on transactional sex, which has a particular focus on Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Pakistan. The project aims to achieve a better and more nuanced understanding of transactional sex – the exchange of sex for cash, goods, services, commodities, mobility or safety – in contexts of acute, chronic and protracted humanitarian crises. Transactional sex is highly prevalent in humanitarian contexts and may be used by people as the only way of surviving or as a complementary strategy to meet urgent, occasional or additional needs.
During conflict, large-scale violations of rights or in the aftermath of disaster, many people are displaced or left homeless with little but what they were wearing or able to grab as they fled. Ideally, humanitarian assistance helps meet immediate needs until they can begin to get back on their feet. In reality, there are many barriers that can prevent people getting help. Even in ideal circumstances it takes time for assistance to arrive, and the global situation now is far from ideal. Funding cuts mean there is less support available overall and in almost every country or crisis a range of services have been cut, from food to healthcare to care for victims of violence, including sexual violence. Even when help arrives, inevitably some people are simply left out. Structural barriers mean that people from communities marginalised by racialised identity, gender or gender identity, ethnicity, faith or age may not get counted or included. They may not hear about distributions or benefits. They may lack the language, literacy or mobility to claim them. They may be unwelcome or even at risk if they try.
In Pakistan, our co-researchers and participants – people involved in transactional sex – often fell into this last category. People we worked with who engaged in transactional sex included Afghan women under threat of being forced back to live under the Taliban, people from securitised communities struggling to access support, and transgender people living life within highly constrained social boundaries. When thinking about how to design a participatory photography workshop, it was vital to keep in mind the structural barriers and constraints in the lives of these participants.
The PhotoVoice training might have been designed with these challenges in mind. We are so accustomed now to taking pictures with our mobile phones that we rarely pause to think about the process or potential implications. In the training, we learned basic skills and principles of photography and also took time to really think about how power and privilege arise when we put a camera between ourselves and someone else. The facilitator’s friendly and reflective approach helped us to understand what an ethical project looks like for everyone involved, from conception through development to curation. When the time came to design my own workshop, I could appreciate the skill that had gone into the pacing and design of the training, alternating time in the classroom with time practicing the skills, and thinking about how to most effectively deliver a message. I valued the opportunities to work individually and collaboratively and the modelling of how to encourage appreciation of another’s work and offer reflections about it sensitively and supportively.
The ListenH initial workshop in Islamabad took place over three days, after which our photographers returned to the communities in which they lived and took photos. They came back several weeks later to share and discuss the work now displayed in Giving Voice to Silence. In the process, we learned some important lessons.
It is vital to think and think again about the interplay of safety and agency
It is difficult to tell a story with photos without accidentally revealing identities. Even a photo of a local landmark can betray someone’s identity, particularly in small communities. We considered whether there is really such a thing as ‘anonymity’. For example, photographing a random front door might protect a person practicing transactional sex by concealing their address, but can inadvertently put someone else at risk of stigma or violence. Thinking about how to avoid risk resulted in participants finding even more creative ways of telling their story. However, it also posed ethical issues relating to agency. For example, for some participants it felt important to be seen and have their faces shown, however after much discussion, the project leadership reluctantly had to say no. While those individuals had the right to take risk for themselves, it might have implicated other people, including children.
Slow down and build trust
Although the group had been working together for some time, there were many differences and disparities to bridge, including gender, language, socio-economic and legal status, education and opportunity. Some participants interpreted for others, creating a disparity between those with direct access to information and those who could only communicate through others. New to the group, I brought my own assumptions and practices, which sometimes clashed with established ways of working. We had only a short time together and there was a lot to do. My initial impulse was to hit the ground running, but it is vital to ensure people feel safe. Spending time at the beginning to think together about ways of working achieves better results and ultimately saves more time than it takes.
Make time to care for participants
Giving Voice to Silence reveals many painful experiences of loss, pain and distress that emerged when people told their stories through photos, including experiences of marginalisation and exploitation, violence, separation from family and home and poverty. For me, there is an almost suffocating feeling of being trapped or imprisoned, which comes through in the photographs but was also palpable in the process. This was both metaphorical and physical – several participants risked arrest and deportation. We became keenly aware of the importance of making time and a safe space for people to feel and express these emotions or to cope with them, in the moment and afterward.
Conclusions
The ListenH project used many ways of exploring and understanding people’s experiences. Each had its merits, but the photography may well be the most evocative and accessible. Perhaps most importantly, it offers participants the most direct and personal way of speaking to a wider audience about their lived experience.
Clea Kahn is the humanitarian lead for ListenH. She has more than 25 years’ experience working mainly in conflict and large-scale rights abuses, with a particular focus on protection of civilians, forced migration and gender-based violence. Clea holds a masters of human rights law and a doctorate in counselling psychology. She presently works as a psychologist with the NHS in London.
