Somewhere in the small Slovakian village of Chl’aba, an old couple sit perched, at the end of their bed, she dressed in plum and he in navy. This is a room that is saturated by the past. The toll of time seeps from the sepia wedding photo, the faded wallpaper and the matching 70s mustard pillows. It lines the faces of Gizka and Gyulabacsi as they sit and look, not at each other, but away, staring out sadly at nothing at all.
This moving snapshot of loss was captured by photographer Gabriela Bulisova. It is part of a series documenting her return to her mother’s native village in Slovakia, capturing the lives of its diminishing inhabitants and, in turn, the fractured past and future of Europe. It also just one of the hundreds of photographs now being showcased on Women Photograph, a website set up last month by Daniella Zalcman, herself a photojournalist.
It was project born out of a realisation that the world of international photojournalism was one still dominated by men – not for a lack of female photographers, but thanks to a perpetual failure on the part of newspapers and major agencies to commission them. Exasperated by the insistence from newspaper photo desks that it was not down to systemic prejudice but because women qualified behind a lens were “impossible to find”, Zalcman set out to prove them wrong.
“The horrific skew towards male photographers was stark from the moment I started out, and I’ve seen very little progress since then,” she says.
Zalcman began compiling the details of fellow female photojournalists from across the world. But what started as an attempt to create a comprehensive list to circulate to newspaper photodesks became something bigger, as hundreds of women submitted their details.
“In the space of a few months, I had 300 names and it was starting to feel like something that was pretty hefty,” says Zalcman. “I thought that it would also be great to create a public showcase for anyone who might want to see and access the work of these women.” She now has more than 550 names.
Her website displays more than 200 photographs by women based in 67 countries, from emerging photographers to established names, such as four-time Pulitzer prize-winner Carol Guzy. Zalcman, who was consistently overlooked for much of her own career, hopes the site will get these deserving female photojournalists commissioned, but also prove how vital it is to have them behind the lens.
“If we ever hope to make journalism a source of diverse storytelling, if we hope to report on different communities, we need a diverse range of perspectives and that’s not happening right now,” she says. “To some extent, photojournalism is this deeply colonial practice. The disproportionate percentage of people going out into other nations and reporting on their socio-political-economic situations are white men. We need to make a bigger effort to change that.”
The project is also shining a light on the experiences she and other female photojournalists have come to normalise as part of the job. “It makes you realise how, from those small micro-aggressions to overt sexual assault, it’s something every female photojournalist deals with on a regular basis. Women have very little protection. And I can’t count the number of times a male photographer will physically take my camera from me, adjust the setting and then hand it back to me as if [he is] doing me some great favour.”
Over the past five years, women have accounted for just 15% of the entries to the World Press Photo awards. Zalcman points out that more than 50% of students on photography and photojournalism courses are women, but “when you look at 30-year-old news photographers, all of a sudden all the women are gone and it becomes 60% or 70% male. So the question is, what happens in those intervening years? Too many women are having bad experiences and saying: ‘Screw it, I don’t want to have to put up with this for the rest of my career.’”
In just a month, the response has been notable. Fifty-five photo editors have reached out to Zalcman for the list and a number of newspapers have distributed the list to their picture desks. While she accepts it will not unravel the “decades of sexism and misogyny that are entrenched in journalism”, getting women’s work seen is a vital step forward.
“It also undoes that archaic idea that women are better at taking sensitive, social photos while men can better document war and tragedy,” she adds. Scrolling through the photos – of the brutal Ukrainian tanks captured by Jen Osborne, the gaudy nightclub queues of Dina Litovsky and the crowded corridor of an Indian train by Sara Hylton – it is clear that a woman’s gaze is anything but narrow.
- See more at womenphotograph.com
Marcos Espinoza, 17, who is half-Guatemalan and half-Mexican, was born and raised in the US. He represents a generation of Hispanics, the biggest and youngest minority group in the country, currently counting nearly 57 million people.
The pharmacy inside Sehida Sarya military field hospital in Hassaka, Syria.
Fljurija Katunari, 18, with her two month-old daughter, Elvira, in a shack on the outskirts of Belgrade, Serbia.
At Pankisi Gorge, a Chechen refugee settlement.
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