Chronicling Conflict
By Ben Bush, Bitch Magazine. Posted June 18, 2005.
Photographer Mimi Chakarova has traveled the world chronicling war, sex trafficking and assaults on human rights. But instead of shocking viewers, her images provoke important questions.
In Ghana, while photographing on an international reporting trip, a car full of young men grabbed the strap of Mimi Chakarova's camera bag and attempted to drive off with it. Chakarova wouldn't let go of the camera case, and was dragged behind the car for half a block until the case's double-stitched strap broke. "I just couldn't stand the thought of some German tourist buying my Leica for 100 dollars," she says.
Chakarova, a documentary photographer who teaches journalism at UC Berkeley, is currently immersed in two long-term projects documenting the military standoff in Kashmir and sex trafficking of women in Eastern Europe. Born in Bulgaria under communism, Chakarova grew up in a village "running barefoot and playing with the chickens."
At the age of thirteen her family traveled to Baltimore, Maryland on a three-month exchange program sponsored by her father's research position at Johns Hopkins University. Chakarova spoke no English, and the inner-city public school she attended classified her as developmentally disabled.
She held down three jobs in order to afford her first camera, which allowed her to communicate visually rather than verbally. She began her work in fine arts photography, receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute before becoming frustrated with the endless introspection of the art world and turning to journalism, finding the field's outward gaze refreshing.
Not yet 30, Chakarova's photography has led her to travel all over the world. Her graduate thesis documented living conditions and human rights in Africa and the Caribbean, and her photos of the daily lives of Cubans surviving in the country's two rival economies: the black market and withering Communism are featured in Capitalism, God and a Good Cigar: Cuba Enters the 21st Century, forthcoming from Duke University Press. "My mother asked me recently, 'Mimi, it's taken us so long to get out of poverty, why do you keep going back?' I said, 'Because it's so familiar, Mom."
Kashmir
The disputed region of Kashmir, located between the two nuclear powers of India and Pakistan, has suffered an estimated 80,000-90,000 fatalities as a result of the conflict hinging on the national and religious dividing line between the Hindu and Muslim countries. Flare-ups between regional militants and Indian troops stationed in the region create a climate of perpetual war.
A recent exhibit of Chakarova's photos of Kashmir at the San Francisco World Affairs Council of Northern California depicts a world of torture, forced relocation, decimated villages, and traumatized civilians. Chakarova focuses on the war's impact on civilians, specifically women, who she believes disproportionately bear the war's hardship.
In one of her photos, beds are lined up across the front lawn of a psychiatric hospital. The facility is filled beyond capacity, as the war invokes not only physical injuries but also cases of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The exhibit's text explains that women in the region attempt suicide with an unusual frequency -- on average, 5 to 7 attempts per day are recorded. (In hopes of forgiveness, attempts are most frequent on Fridays, the holiest day of the week in Islamic tradition.) Most choose to consume toxic organo-phosphorus pesticides used in agriculture. A young woman working in rural development, quoted in the exhibit, declares, "I am fighting a war on two fronts; I am fighting a patriarchal society and also dealing with the conflict that's existed here since I got out of school."
After photographing a massacre which included women, children, the elderly, and the disabled, Chakarova chose to exhibit only a photograph of the evidence left behind. After the 23 bodies were removed for burial, a flip-flop sandal leaned against the padded armrest of a crutch, and a woman's shoe rested against a dark stain of blood on the autumn leaves of the forest floor.
Feeling that viewers are already inundated with violent images, Chakarova prefers images that raise questions instead of the short-lived attention gained through shock value. Instead of titling her photos, Chakarova captions them with descriptions of the conflict's history and excerpts of interviews. A man clasps the head of his tortured brother, perhaps dead; beneath the image is his, rather than Chakarova's, explanation of what has happened. "They blindfolded him, poured salt and pepper in his wounds and electrocuted him."
In a picture of a military bunker, an enormous gun leans against a wall plastered with photos of naked blond women and clothed Indian fashion models, diligently cut out in silhouette. "I LOVE MY INDIA" is scrawled across it in white chalk. Chakarova's caption describes her encounter with a general, who as a matter of national security, forbid her from photographing inside the military camp.
"Kashmir was incredibly lonely," Chakarova remembers. "All of my friends were male journalists. As a woman, once it gets dark you can't wander the streets because there are soldiers everywhere." She took to sleeping with her film in her pillowcase, partially to guard it but also to stave off feelings of total isolation. "The majority of people I've met don't want to be part of India or Pakistan; they feel like they've been used." Chakarova will be returning to Kashmir in the summer and plans to release the project as a book.
Sex trafficking
An Eastern European complexion has become synonymous with prostitution. On the streets of Turkey, men would holler at Chakarova, calling her "Natasha." From Dubai to Israel to southeast Asia -- wherever women migrate from the economically depressed post-communist Eastern European countries -- prostitutes are known simply as "Natashas."
Shaista, an educated 24-year-old lecturer at the local university, meets her husband for the first time at an engagement party arranged by a professional matchmaker. Kashmir, 2003.
While it is not uncommon for women from these regions, desperate for money for themselves and their families, to emigrate to wealthier regions to find employment in sex work, trafficking is something else entirely. As with all sex trafficking, these girls are often duped into indentured sexual servitude, often believing they are being transported to work in the mainstream service industry.
"One girl grabbed my arm and said 'Do you want to know how it was? 30 customers per day, the youngest was 11 and the oldest was 83,’" Chakarova recalls. She quotes another anonymous girl: "Some of the men felt sorry for me when they saw I was pregnant, but they still had sex with me."
Chakarova and her collaborator, writer Lauren Gard, traveled to Moldova, which has the highest incidence of trafficked girls and, not coincidentally, is also the poorest country in Europe. Located between Romania and the Ukraine, Moldova's living standards fell post-communism, with poverty still on the rise and wage discrepancies between men and women growing at a rapid pace.
Through a shelter frequented by girls who had been trafficked, Chakarova and Gard met Olesea. Their project retraces her path from Moldova to Turkey, where Chakarova's fractured Russian, dredged up from childhood, allowed them to pose as girls looking for work in order to meet one of Olesea's clients. Through him, they made contact with her pimp.
"Here, I have my credentials and my affiliation with the University of California," Chakarova explains. "There, that was all gone -- all he saw was a girl from Bulgaria looking for work. Imagine having a man stare at you and evaluate you like cattle based on your appearance, the way you talk and how you move. Everything about you has a certain price. This pimp was notorious for doing sadistic shit to these girls. I had seen the scars and I had heard the stories. These guys know how to perform abortions and how to hit you so you don't bruise. They raped the girls many times. He didn't know that we knew any of this. He was giving us his best facade, which is ‘We're gonna be partners, fifty-fifty.’ I knew he was offering to buy us, and if we were ignorant and desperate village girls, we would look at him as our savior."
For reporters who want to do more than interview girls after the fact, there are two routes to a first-hand account. Women journalists pose as girls looking for work, but for male journalists reporting on sex trafficking in Kashmir for American and European newspapers and magazines, their option is to pose as customers.
Chakarova comments that because of the male photojournalists’ pose as customers, their images often resemble soft-core porn, playing up the issue's sex appeal. "In a lot of the cases, the girls are wearing a bra and bikini and lots of makeup. It's almost like lingerie ads. The photos show no insight into who they truly are."
Chakarova sees this as contributing to an inability to see the underlying causes of trafficking. "I read everything there was on sex trafficking in Moldova and always there was the same bullshit, which is 'Why is the demand so high for girls particularly from Moldova? Because they're incredibly beautiful.' That's the stereotype, and journalists publishing these photographs and printing these words are adding to the stereotype because people read this and think 'I want a girl from Moldova because they're notorious for being gorgeous.' Guess what? These girls who have been trafficked and at the high schools in the villages, they're not supermodels. They're just ordinary girls with pimples and imperfections. Ordinary girls living in really poor circumstances."
With her basic Russian, Chakarova was only able to ask simple questions of the girls, like "What happened?" But when she did, girls would spill over with information. "On several occasions, I said 'Why are you telling me all this? Why are you giving me so much?' and they said, 'You're the only one who isn't judging me for what has happened to me.’"
Chakarova spent time photographing the shelters in Moldova where the girls were living. "To me it's really important sometimes just to put the camera away and be a person, be compassionate and be yourself. The main thing for me is just to be there and make girls laugh, dance in front of them, say something in Russian that's really silly. Just make them laugh. Do you know how good that feels when I know what they've been through? They're at a shelter and we're all smoking and they're just giggling like they should be because they're 19 and 20. I don't have pictures of that, because I was actually experiencing it. A lot of photographers are always behind the camera and quit experiencing what's in front of them. I want to be able to say 'Fuck it, I'm not going to have these shots, I'm not going to take pictures right now. They see that: 'So she's not just taking and taking and taking; she's actually giving something in return.' That's what I mean when I say I leave behind pieces of myself."
To contact Mimi Chakarova or view her photographs and other projects, visit www.mclight.com. "Capitalism, God and a Good Cigar: Cuba Enters the 21st Century," (Duke University Press) features over 70 of Chakarova's documentary photos of Cuba.
Ben Bush is a frequent contributor to Bitch, Kitchen Sink and XLR8R.
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good work.
Posted by: sarah on Jun 19, 2005 12:33 PM [Report this comment]
I like Mimi Chakarova & her work. In the glut of media coverage of tragedy, trauma, & horror, the public tends to develop emotional shields, per se. There is so much info. about far away places & so many discussions of pain that the victims of tragedies can lose their humanity to those being informed. Please don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that such victims are non-humans, i'm saying that with all the info, they become faceless. The victims become examples, statistics, or mere "headshots" for issues so painful that it's easier to percieve them as too distant to be human.
Ironically, even marketers for change dehumanize. For instance, i read a magazine ad soliciting money to "help orphans for only a dollar a day." Glancing at the photos, I saw an updated shot of Sally Struthers, but the same photo of the same hungry big-eyed toddler that i'd seen for decades. That child, i thought, had either survived into adulthood on the "pennies" a day solicited in the past, or had died. Either way, the person in campaign. Someone, maybe, but not with her face.
I noticed similar media coverage. For instance the public is shocked by reports & photographs of reports on different issues in Africa. Perhaps for dramatic effect, the reports tend to both ovewhelm and to magnify the "exotic," romanticizing those effected by drought, famine, and violence. With such input, I start doubting my "right" to interfere, thinking momentarily & incorrectly, that these ancient peoples are like story folk, part of a movie that evokes emotion to watch from the comfort of my modern home. So separate, I even have insane "guilty american" spasms, thinking maybe it's best not to intervene with such noble old souls. But beneath the stories and stock photos are real people, prefering not to be hungry, thirsty, sick, or hacked with machetes.
The work of people like Mimi C, can help re-sensitize the American public. I was impressed that in the shelter for the rescued girls, she didn't photograph the giggling girls since she was experiencing them. In this, she recognizes the individuality of her subjects. That respect & recognition shows in her work. Her photographs are of human beings who giggle, grieve, hunger, & experience life, just as we all do. With the faces of tragedy rehumanized, we can begin see them as ourselves & our neighbors & feel able to help.
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