Tanya Habjouqa: On reevaluation and responsibility
In this episode, we talk with Tanya Habjouqa about reevaluation and responsibility. Tanya shares how her Circassian background motivates her work as she feels the diasporic community’s story was never told. She reflects on how the process of printmaking has allowed her to forge a deeper physical connection with her art which can be healing. Tanya explains the countless ethical considerations involved in photographing Palestine including the topic of embedding as well as the targeting of journalists. She also discusses the different levels of involvement and responsibility involved in photographing a community and the impact of parachute journalism.
What you’ll find inside:
“I need to care about the community that I’m photographing, there needs to be a stake a personal stake.” (13.17)
On printmaking: “There was something healing about that process but it was also just wow I can take a faint archival picture I can utilise images that I could not in our traditional photography realm.” (14.29)
On art books: “It was this moment where I understood I was in a position where I could bring my documentary work and ethics but find new ways of layering bringing in history and overlaying texts.” (15.16)
“The community who’s story you’re telling they should recognise themselves. You should invest time before picking up your camera, I really see photography as an intellectual practice.” (19.24)
“You have the power and the responsibility of that archive, I don’t think you shouldn’t take the picture. Sometimes if there is something happening take it and then carefully carry that close to you and unpack where that should go or if it should go.” (21.02)
“I think we have a responsibility to try to innovate in our image making and to be as layered and nuanced as possible.” (39.22)
What does photography ethics mean to Tanya?
“It’s a process of being thoughtful, evolved emotionally intelligent human beings and understanding that this is not a right, you worked very hard to get access. You can tell there’s a difference between a parachute journo drop in snapshot, you can tell when you’ve been invited into the house and that there’s a degree of trust it’s very clear in the image and what’s reflected. It’s just a constant evaluation checking in with stake holders. There’s no key formula you also end up developing an intuition and trusting your intuition.” (40.33)
Links:
Tanya Habjouqa is a documentary photographer and educator, known for blending an intuitive sense of metaphor with investigations into community trauma and dispossession. Her artistic practice links collaborative portraiture, gender, representations of otherness, and human rights with a mordant sense of irony. Born in Amman to a Circassian father and Texan mother, the Circassian genocide and subsequent sanctuary in Jordan influenced her work. Her first monograph, Occupied Pleasures was published in 2015 and heralded by TIME magazine and the Smithsonian as one of the best photo books of that year, the project winning a World Press Photo award in 2014. Tanya is a founding mentor in the Arab Documentary Program, nurturing marginalized narratives and photographers from the Middle East and North Africa for over a decade. She has worked as a freelance photographer for the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Le Monde, National Geographic, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post. Represented by East Wing Gallery, she is concurrently teaching and securing her second Masters, an MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researching artist books, print and paper making, cartonera, archive, and documentary theatre.
You can see her work at https://tanyahabjouqa.com
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