PROJECT GOAL

THE ARCHITECTURE OF RESISTANCE & FEMINIST MONUMENT PRECEDENTS

SUSAN MEISELAS
A ROOM OF THEIR OWN

A Room of Their Own takes a creative approach to revealing gender based violence in the Black Country, West Midlands, UK region, without betraying the confidence and privacy of the individuals. The experience of witnessing Susan Meiselas’ images in A Room of Their Own can be both straightforward and complex. On the one hand, these are simply empty rooms in which no active trauma has been experienced; on the other, the spaces represent a shelter and harbor from acts of violence suffered by their inhabitants. As a spectator, one can empathize, pity, hope, pray, identify with these women. The empty room stands as a powerful mechanism of recollection; though devoid of people, the photographs are actually teeming with life, recanting stories and memories that together add up to exalt the vernacular existences women lead which are not usually seen. One can listen to these photographs and hear the untold stories of these women. By choosing to highlight and capture vacant space, Meiselas has given her subjects the gift of both anonymity and subjecthood. These women are now arbiters of their own lives moving forward, and have become the center of the narrative.
When exploring the idea of the feminist gaze, it is important to note that Meiselas’ book is fully titled “With Women in Refuge.” To be with the subjects of her photographs, Meiselas takes a necessarily passive role as spectator. Her camera seeks not the traditional role of voyeur and instead remains open and willing to participate in intimate moments with her subjects. She chooses to bear witness to the not so small acts of bravery enacted by these women - victims of horrible violence and trauma - in choosing to share and reveal their rooms with her camera. By capturing her subjects as absences in rooms or with their backs turned, occupied in everyday tasks such as doing the dishes, she upends the traditional photographic gaze and instead offers an attentiveness and reverence to previously invisible, female activity. 

The ethical question of what it means to expose these spaces and make these women seen is necessarily approached through the lens of Ariella Azoulay’s definition of the “photographic event.” According to Azoulay, “the photographed image produced out of an encounter invariably contains both more and less than that which someone wished to inscribe in it…The photograph is always in excess of, and always bears a lack in relation to, each of its protagonists.” Azoulay refers, of course, to the sovereignty of the photographer and the power dynamic between capturer and captured. Meiselas, however, flips this notion on its head. The empty rooms she photographs in the women’s shelter are neither in excess nor lacking in relation to their protagonists. Assuming the images are not staged, Meiselas chooses to passively, impartially bear witness to the true existences of her subjects. The act of witnessing and listening is, in this sense, an act of radical feminism, and one which completely dismantles the male gaze.

MARIA JOSE CONTRERAS LORENZINI
AQUÍ

While Meiselas takes a micro lens to the experience of trauma in individuals in the women's shelter, Contreras takes a macro view of the cultural memory of the desaparecidos and state sanctioned genocide in Chile. Though zoomed out both figuratively to the level of collective, national memory, and literally photographed from afar by drone, Contreras’ Aquí project employs a similar methodology to A Room of Their Own. By mapping sites of state violence throughout the city utilizing her own pregnant body, Contreras displays a powerful, visual reminder of what happened there.

At the same time, in the act of lying down, she performs a surrender and a silent reverence for the victims of these acts. In her own words during her class visit, she is not “here in the place of those who are not here.” She does not seek to represent the desaparecidos, but rather to commemorate them and highlight the scar on the city landscape, which is more of a lack of presence or a non-presence. In this way, the empty space these dead and missing occupy becomes the space in which the artist remembers and highlights a social and cultural wound, and admonishes against future acts of state terrorism. In the vein of the feminist gaze, this void and surrender becomes the objective of the photographs.

If, as Roland Barthes says, the photograph is “the skin of encounter,” how can we look with others and not at them? The moment we “touch” the image becomes the moment in which we as spectators derive meaning, judgment, and begin the process of constructing a narrative. Meiselas and Contreras both methodologically place the camera inside a restorative framework, removing themselves as authors in order to highlight victims’ experiences. In this way, though photography can injure and wound, it can also mobilize, repair and heal.

SITES OF CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE TO THE ABORTION RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN NEW YORK CITY

The objective of my thesis is to expand the power of Historic Preservation as a field to protect the rights and safety of women, highlight and educate about histories we cannot afford to revisit, and to explore the designation of architecture which was not purpose-built, but rather adapted out of necessity by activist groups and clinicians. There are currently 119 sites in Manhattan that celebrate women’s history, as outlined in a 2019 Google Map project by Scott Stringer’s office. Only 40 of those are New York City Landmarks, predominantly designated for their connections to women’s suffrage. Out of 36,000 designated properties, women’s history accounts for less than 1% of New York City Landmarks. 

My research revolves predominantly around the 1960s and 1970s Second Wave in Greenwich Village - the time just prior to Roe v. Wade, when many feminist groups were staging sit-ins, consciousness-raising meetings, political actions and forums for exchange of ideas and experience. The history of the abortion movement in New York City is intrinsically linked with its physical relegation to back rooms, apartments, short-lived clinics and informal gathering spaces. Because of the revolutionary and often illegal nature of the work being accomplished, sites of cultural heritage important to this history are more often than not invisible. Hand in hand with the makeshift nature of the movement is the highly personal and private experience of pregnancy, motherhood and sexual autonomy amongst women throughout history. Many activists throughout the twentieth century have cited their need to simply share their story, to connect and share their experiences having abortions in order to feel a sense of normalcy and to ensure more open access and acceptance of the practice for future generations. The shame and need for privacy associated with abortion continues to this day. Such sites of invisible activist history can be found in informal gathering spaces and churches, as well as clinics, homes, offices and medical establishments. By reclaiming a map of sites of abortion rights activism and work in New York City throughout history, we can further bolster these open lines of communication and knowledge, and ensure abortion access for all.

In relation to this work, I find both Aquí and A Room of Their Own’s treatment of physical space to be extremely compelling. In the 1968 photograph by Bev Grant, above, a group of twelve women are seen meeting in an ad hoc space - somebody’s apartment - to discuss the work, actions and publications of the New York Radical Women. In a 2022 interview, Grant is cited as saying her camera is a “tool” or “weapon” in the struggle, and that she thinks of herself as a “cultural worker.” Her photographs of protests and political actions of the era are often warm and intimate, due in part to the large format of the film prints. However, they also capture a spirit and ethos, the strength and vitality of resistance. 

I would be interested in locating the sites of these photographic events, and re-staging them today as empty spaces. I am also interested in photographing sites where actions took place - many of them outside court proceedings, inside church basements, and of course, in private apartments. What would it mean to imbue these empty spaces with meaning in the manner of Contreras and Meiselas, with both an emptiness and a fullness? Additionally, to show the frequency and physical locations of these sites on a map would be powerful. By creating this map, I would expose a scar upon the city landscape, wherein women gathered, resisted and won the right to choose - a history we are in dire need of remembering. The history of the abortion rights movement in New York City is comprised of hundreds of improvised activist spaces such as these. I wish to make the invisible visible through my thesis work, and to do so with a care and camaraderie inherent to the work of Meiselas and Contreras.

QUESTIONS MOVING FORWARD

CITATIONS