This has been true throughout the ages and the reason behind this silence is two-fold; it is partly due to woman historically have little access to control over the media and partly due to the way in which woman are portrayed by the media. As Laura Mulvey argues in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, woman tend to be objectified in film and media for the pleasure of the male viewer. Women have a “traditional exhibitionist role” in which they are “looked at and displayed”.

With the feminist movement came the empowering of women and the search for a separation from men and their desires. A powerful tool in transmitting messages in the camera and photography, which can be used to objectify and harm woman, can also be used to liberate by offering up the image of strong, independent women.  In ‘The New Woman International’, which chronologizes the emergence of the ‘modern woman’, it is explained that “visual representation provided some of the most fertile ground for defining and expressing New Womanhood.” This is because photographs can be powerful tools that influence our perceptions, they become metaphors for the state of womanhood. A compelling argument is that “the development of a feminine modernism was parallel to the emergence of new visual technology” and that the feminist movement was “a creature not only of modernity but also of modern technology” because of the access and new possibilities this offered. In Benchallal’s case, for example, technology undoubtedly played a vital role in her project. Hand-held, personal cameras allowed her to explore on her own, uninhibited by bulky box cameras prompted up on a tripod of the past. These pictures hanging on the walls of NYUAD, spreading the Benchallal’s message further, was only possible thanks to modern technology which allowed them to be enlarged, printed and turned into a gallery collection. Although I do not place all of the responsibility on modern technology, I do think that the two emerged hand in hand and had a great influence on one another and that “through photography and film, these images could most easily be transmitted, reprinted, or projected”

What is interesting about Benchallal’s photographs is that they focus not just on woman but on woman in the Muslim world. Although there are passages of the Qur’an that support equality between men and woman, there have been frequent interpretations that “limit the rights of woman and deny equality” (p. 165). This is why there is an even greater struggle for the woman’s movement in such countries and why it has been slow in the making, although process is being made. Also, it’s interesting how the majority of the woman in Benchallal’s pictures are covered and veiled; they observe the world from a hidden vantage point and usually go by unobserved.

Photographs are unlike other pieces of artwork in that they rely on a subject, someone whose image is being captured rather than designed. Benchallal has very direct aims with her photographic work but how much authorship does she have in creating the images or is she merely capturing what is already there?

Vilen Flusser gives a significant amount of responsibility directly the apparatus – the camera - that is used to capture and transform these particles rather than to the photographer. He argues that photographs are “envisioned surfaces computed from particles” (33), that they depict events in the particle universe (35) and transform the “abstract particles” into the “concrete” (34) and that “a photograph shows a chemist how specific molecules of silver compound have reacted to specific photons” (35).

However, there is a much stronger argument to suggest that a photographer does in fact have much ownership to the images captured. The type of photography will influence the extent to which the photographer has control – for example, a floral artist will have much greater control at organizing the scene than a documentary photographer such as Benchallal. Benchallal admits that she simply captures what is there, she is documenting what she sees rather than directly adjusting the scene in order to fit her artistic requirements. Even so, however, as a photographer she has direct control over her camera. This ties in with Flusser’s argument: perhaps the apparatus is responsible for the physical task of photography, but the human behind it is still in control of using the apparatus. The use of a camera is so much more than just pressing a button.

Even when simply “capturing what is there”, the photographer has to make choices and decisions about how to portray what they see. These choices are called “necessary decisions” in the photography world and they include everything from the technical aspects such as aperture, shutter speed and focal length to editing, framing and the baseline decision of what to take a picture of. The photographer has “a range of possible settings at her disposal” and actively making decisions of how to take the photograph. Making these choices means that the “photographer’s intentions, beliefs, and decisions do play a central role in the process of production of a photograph”, it is simply not true that a camera in itself is solely responsible for the final product. The photographer as an individual making both personal and artistic choices “has a great influence on the way the resulting photograph looks.”

In “Three Kinds of Realism”, it is argued that these choices are taken not just on face value of what the image will visually look like, but with the direct aim. The photographer will alter the settings of the camera “depending on what the photographer wants to convey, that is, depending on the story she wants to tell us with her photograph.”

Nadia Benchallal is very clear in what she wants her photographs to accomplish: she wishes to “explores how the women are becoming emancipated and modernized while keeping their culture and traditions in conservative societies”. Her photographs are not accidental results of releasing the shutter, she has authored these images in order to tell a story.

In this image, two women wearing veils are walking down a street at nightfall. They face away from the camera, seemingly in conversation, and one of the woman clutches the arm of the other. A striking characteristic of this photograph is the blurry, slightly out of focus look it has.  This effect comes from a combination of the aperture and the shutter speed variations and it creates an appearance of movement and of speed. These women are walking with a purpose. What I find intriguing, however, is the story behind this image. Benchallal explained during her interview that these woman are hurrying home from an afternoon at the beach. The call for curfew had gone off and they are hurrying home to escape the night. This story is not transmitted in the photograph though. 

Photographs have the ability to ‘freeze’ time; what is depicted is the moment captured, not always in context, but simply frozen forever more. “The photograph, after all, is a death‐dealing apparatus in its capacity to fetishize and congeal time.” The black and white effect of Nadia’s photographs only accentuate this notion of time being frozen. The photographs have an age old look, one that continues into the future and encroaches on the past.  Depicting her images in black and white was a very conscious decision on the part of Benchallal, one that she took because she believes that “black and white picture has a power of putting you right into a story.” It pulls you in and transcends the borders of time. According to Benchallal, the power of black and white stems from there being “big emotional and historical issues” which arise from colourless photography.

In ‘Eternal Return’, it explains that photographs are screens that reflect and alter the way we see the world. “The screen defines the process through which we perform ourselves simultaneously as subjects and objects of looking.” It also says that it is “the site where subject and object, self and other, intertwine to produce intersubjective meaning”. This is why photographs have such weight and power at transforming how we see our world and how we see ourselves.