‘Picturing Afghan Women’ for Western audiences: The Afghan perspective

Abstract

As the United States engages with the Taliban in a peace process that might return them to influence within Afghanistan, concerns are rising regarding the future status of Afghan women. In this background, this article returns to the much studied subject of the portrayal of Afghan women in Western news media through Orientalist stereotypes. Noting the lack of Afghan perspectives in previous research on this topic, the study investigates the views and practices of Afghan photojournalists, who have today come to replace international photojournalists in the country, when it comes to ‘picturing Afghan women’ for Western audiences. It sheds light on the day-to-day professional activities of these photojournalists when producing images of Afghan women for Western audiences. It goes on to explore Afghan photojournalists’ perceptions about how Afghan women have been and are being portrayed in Western news media. Finally, it reports on how most of these Afghan photojournalists may perpetuate the same stereotypes about Afghan women for Western audiences because hierarchies in the international ‘visual gatekeeping chain’ supersede the Afghan photojournalists’ power to shape visual narratives and coupled with the need to earn an income as precarious labor, their individual self-reflexivity regarding picturing Afghan women are suppressed. The study also notes how photographing Afghan women causes risks for Afghan photojournalists as well as the Afghan women who are photographed. Attention is called to this hitherto invisible ethical concern that lives are jeopardized to validate Western savior narratives regarding Afghan women through images.

Straddlers not spiralists: Critical questions for research on fixers, local-foreign news work, and cross-border journalism

“…Empirical work with local-foreign news workers in diverse settings have time and again found this multi-spatial dynamic central to their journalistic labor (e.g., Khan, M. 2020; Moon, 2019; Mitra, 2020). The informative, civic, and dialogic role played by local-foreign news workers can be recognized as acts of lived citizenship which have political import in, and impact on, more than one place.…”

“…2019; Plaut and Klein, 2019; Baloch and Andresen, 2020; Khan, M., 2020), postcolonial studies suggests itself as a useful yet underappreciated toolkit for drawing out the power relations attendant to the production of cross-border journalism. While postcolonial theory has informed studies of communication broadly (e.g., Shome and Hegde, 2002; Gunaratne, 2010; Waisbord and Mellado, 2014; Shome, 2012), apart from isolated anthropological and sociological studies of journalism practice (e.g., Pedelty, 1995) , this theoretical approach – with the exception of the occasional uptake of the foundational work of Edward Said (e.g., in Khan, A., 2019; Mitra, 2020; Mitra et al, 2021) – has not been adequately applied to local-foreign news work specifically.…”

Medium-Specific Threats for Journalists: Examples from Philippines, Afghanistan and Venezuela

“…The media industry in Afghanistan which had collapsed from decades of war and political instability (Rawan 2002) has seen a large influx of funds from the international community, particularly Western donors (Cary 2012). Success of these efforts, however, has been modest and media organizations are beholden in various ways to the Afghan government and other non-state political actors, while also often being dependent on donor funding for survival (Brown 2013;Relly and Zanger 2017;Mitra 2019). One of the most glaring failures of the international community and post-2001 Afghan administrations is that Afghanistan continues to rank as a highly unsafe country for journalists (UNESCO 2018a).…”

“…To impose this ban, the Taliban actively persecuted professional photographers. Not surprisingly, photojournalism became almost non-existent in Afghanistan by 2001 but with the help of foreign donors, and through Afghan initiative, photography and photojournalism have been again taken up by a number of Afghan men and women (Murray 2012;Birk and Foley 2016;Mitra 2019).…”

“…This threat faced by photojournalists in Afghanistan because of the very medium through which and in which they do journalism is not often discussed within the issue of journalists' safety in Afghanistan. Foreign donor-led efforts have fuelled a steady re-growth in photojournalism in the post-2001 period (Cary 2012;Murray 2012;Mitra 2019) alongside the media industry as a whole. But, as this study found, intolerance of photography, and consequently threat to photojournalists, have not disappeared magically with the retreat of the Taliban and the infusion of donor dollars into the post-2001 Afghan media economy.…”