The Subversion of Hierarchies of Power: How Conflict Women Photographers’ Gendered and Racialised Disparities Shape Oppositional Gazes on War

Varricchio, Angela and Ferreday, Debra and Gilloch, Graeme (2024) The Subversion of Hierarchies of Power: How Conflict Women Photographers’ Gendered and Racialised Disparities Shape Oppositional Gazes on War. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Conflict photography has historically been and still represents a highly Western white men-dominant field. In recent years, several studies have explored the impact of gender on the formation of photographic gazes on war. When accessing the field, women play a relevant role in reframing traditional canons of the conflict agenda (Westcott Campbell & Critcher, 2018; Allan, 2019) and ethics (Chouliaraki, 2013), established by their male colleagues. However, whether and how the intertwining of gender and race influences war photography’s deconstruction of cultural systems of power remains an unexplored topic. To investigate it, I analyse two conflicts by drawing on my experience and knowledge as a photojournalist and conflict documentarist. I use autoethnography to explore how my southern-Italian white femininity impacts on the formation of my conflict documentary about the post-fascist Julian-Dalmatian question. This method also allows me to elaborate my experience by using a more personal, emotional and poetic language, remote from the constraints of academia. Then, I employ online sources to collect and critically analyse photographs of the Yemen conflict, produced by international women and men photographers. I also use semi-structured interviews with women war photographers covering the Yemen war, to explore the ideas of actors at the margins of conflict photography ecology. My study shows that women photographers’ struggles within society and photo news ecology shape anti-hierarchical photographic gazes on conflict. The personal difficulties lived as a southern Italian woman reshaped my narratives of the Julian-Dalmatian question protagonists by shifting the focus and tone towards invisible witnesses of the tragedy. A comparative analysis of the Yemen conflict imagery produced by international men and women photographers also shows similar results. The patriarchal nature of society and photo news ecology impacts strongly on the formation of photographic narratives of the Yemen conflict and its protagonists, especially when comparing Yemeni women and men photographers. Yemeni women photographers introduced new actors to the war scenario and employed more sophisticated positive tones and categories in framing conflict (a “Phoenix rising from war ashes” effect) than their male counterparts. They also show great strength in shifting the understanding of conflict actors, time and space, and provide more structured decolonised, depatriarchalised and counter-anthropocentric perspectives.