Photography: A Weapon of Choice: The Story of “Dias Eternos” and Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen
There are 96 women currently imprisoned in El Valle Detention Center. Most of them have not yet faced trial and cannot afford to pay the $1,000 to the police to go to a less overpopulated center of detention.
Photos by Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen
To interview Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen, LHSA’s 2020 Photography Grant recipient, is to come away with the impression that she is as gregarious and engaging as she is intense and passionate. Ana Maria describes herself as a fighter for women’s rights who has chosen visual storytelling to document the injustices they endure. To hear her in a presentation and see her work is to feel and see an intense desire to defend those rights through the power of her images. Her story is one of personal growth, discovery, and following a burning passion for making a difference in the world.
Ana Maria was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and as a young girl she grew up in a world ruled by a corrupt, dictatorial government, where violence was the norm and social order was spiraling into steady decay. In her late teens, she witnessed a shooting in a bar six feet in front of her and on a separate occasion was beaten unconscious during a protest rally. At the young age of twenty, she reached a tipping point and made the decision to leave Venezuela to study political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Toulouse, France. Culturally in Venezuela, for a young woman to leave home, even at twenty years old, was considered rare but she felt she had no choice: “I left because I couldn’t be my whole self,” she said. “I couldn’t drive, shop, be with my friends, skate in the streets, play music, or anything without being aware of my circumstances.”
In Toulouse she experienced what it felt like to be free from the oppression she felt for most of her life. “It was a beautiful casualty that I ended up in that city; it shaped me,” she remembered. “During the first years I went to University, I discovered something called photojournalism. The last year before getting into the journalism master’s degree, I plucked myself from the University and went straight to a photography school so I could learn about photojournalism. It became clear that the camera could be an effective and powerful tool. Since then, photography has been my weapon of choice in a very natural and instinctive way.”
Three years later in 2017, she returned home to even worse conditions. Buildings were decaying, the economy had further deteriorated, prices had skyrocketed. Moreover, she saw how much the people’s hope for a better future had crumbled like the buildings around her. Desperate to do something, she reached out to a journalist friend for advice: “I spoke to her about how I could approach the root causes of this crisis using photography. My friend belonged to an NGO that defends the rights of the people who are detained. A detention center is a place where people are expected to be held for only 45 days. But because of the country’s long crises, this notion is a memory. I was shocked to learn that some of these centers were so overcrowded that the female detainees were getting pregnant because they shared cells with male detainees.”
This revelation ultimately led her to document the human rights abuses and unpardonable conditions that women in detention centers face in the Venezuelan prison system on a daily basis. She named her project Dias Eternos (Eternal Days) and in the years since, has dedicated herself to give a voice to these women.
Gaining access to the detention centers posed challenges, but her approach aligned itself with her philosophy on photography. For Ana Maria, photography is simply a vehicle to satisfy her natural curiosity for people. She describes Dias Eternos as an intentionally long-term project because she is determined to build relationships with her subjects first, as much to build trust as to understand their plight. This takes time. Her natural empathy enables her to capture their hopelessness and despair and puts the viewer into the “very skin of her subjects.”
When I asked her to describe some of the women she met and how the experience of walking into potentially dangerous situations affected her emotionally and physically, she had this to say:
“My first visit to a detention center confirmed everything I had been told. It had five cells for a hundred detainees, including one cell for the detained women. The women used to share the space with the male detainees, but the police officers turned their office into a women-only cell. A group of eleven women, including a 21-year-old in her eighth month of pregnancy, were sharing the small space. The air inside was suffocating; they only had one small window to let the air come in and they shared skinny mattresses to sleep on the floor. These women did not know when they were going to move on to trial. They did not know if they were going to be released. They did not know their lawyers. Some had been waiting for their trial for years. The criminal justice system in Venezuela does not work equally for everybody. On the contrary, it takes away the rights of the poorest and the most vulnerable members of society. None of the persons that I met during the time of my reporting in Venezuela came from middle- or high-class groups. In Venezuela, if you are rich and guilty, you will not go to jail…the system bends towards the wealthy and the political sphere. Many women remain detained without dignity and stripped of their human rights.” The shame and anger she felt that day fueled her desire to expose the plight of these women and start a dialogue about current laws and justice systems in her country.
Lessons Learned – It isn’t difficult to imagine the adverse effects Ana Maria must have felt being around the detainees and getting to know them. I was curious to know how she felt about photographing her subjects during their most vulnerable and personal moments, whether she contemplated the moral versus aesthetic mission that her project sought to achieve. For example, many of the overcrowded cells do not have toilets, much less privacy, and the women are forced to relieve themselves in front of others using a can or a bucket. They sleep together, crammed on mattresses on the floor, legs and bodies intertwined. There are moments of intense sadness when a detainee is visited by a husband or loved one and must endure their leaving. I wondered how she reconciled the dichotomy of portraying them in an artistic way versus becoming voyeuristic with their circumstance in order to help them.
There is a guilt,” she said, “but if I’m going to do a project, I do it as respectfully as I can. I make the decision to make it as ethically as possible and answer the hard questions that I am asking. I think it’s normal for anyone who works on a project like this to have guilt. But you do it seriously, for change, for impact. It’s important to reflect on this. We have enough photojournalists who drop in, do a story, and leave. It’s important to take your time to know the people that you are photographing, to open your heart to them and learn from each encounter. Listen to them. Fall in love with them. That is respect!”
Despite Ana Maria’s integrity and desire to humanize her subjects, it came at a price. “Leaving the detention center without crying is very hard,” she said. “…I see all these abuses and I have to behave and hide my anger at what I’m seeing. In the beginning, I used to bottle it all up until I came home, and I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. I had to learn how to cope, so I write songs, I play a lot of sports, do a lot of yoga. Photojournalist friends understand what I go through. I have a therapist and a support group who help me. It’s important to have a community that I can depend upon.”
Throughout her journey with Dias Eternos, Ana Maria has remained positive and happy in her life. She’s learned to cope by always working on more than one project at a time, and she is also a singer songwriter. Her passion for music affords her a different form of personal expression that brings balance to her daily life. Ana Maria is also helped by her natural sunny outlook and the support of her husband. I asked her what the project has taught her and how she keeps herself moving forward. She paused and said, “Photographing these women, I learned about solidarity and respect. None of them die from hunger; they become allies and friends and they share everything: clothing, food, water, medicine, they share mattresses. The women work together to survive, which is different from the men who fight amongst themselves in the prisons. I’ve learned how resistant they are as human beings. Personal hygiene is important to them, they put on makeup and wash their hair as an act of vengeance, as if to say, ‘you’re not gonna make me fall.’ The women maintain their dignity and are resilient.”
“I am always inspired by resilience,” she continued, “by the everlasting flame of those who never stop, of those who move forward. I am inspired by those who fight for their rights and those who think and speak freely. Today, I am inspired by those who want our survival as a species, of those who are listening to our most ancestral ways, of those who seek the balance of Nature…Patience inspires me. Life and death inspire me. An open heart during the process of creation can be a catalyst of inspiration for other ideas or projects. I am inspired by the mysterious and the underreported.”
afterword – Since its first recipient in 2017, the LHSA Photography Grant has been awarded to four aspiring photographers. Each of them has sought to create their own unique, personal project and has used photography as their weapon of choice to focus on issues and people who are on the verge of being forgotten. The Society can take pride in knowing it helped these warriors who fight to make a difference in the world through their images. Ana Maria Arevalo Gosen is our most recent reminder that the power of photography can be a tool to improve and celebrate the human condition.
Ana Maria’s Five Tips for Finding & Completing a Photo Project
1.) finding a project feels like something you can fish out of the ocean! It is not. A project must have a dense layer of personal implication. It should be something that comes out from your heart, and that you decide is crucial to develop. To find a project you must dig into your heart and explore with your senses, emotions, and spirit where you want to go.
2.) research Once it is decided, you must go into a phase of research, to look for as much information possible about the subject, with patience. Patience is the key. Applying for grants and getting rejected is a good way to filter information because for grants you have to write, write, and write! It is important to put in words what you want to photo- graph, why is it important. It allows you to put into words what is essential.
3.) starting Sometimes for me it is so comfortable to stay doing research, but there comes a time when finally starting the project arrives. What I do in the beginning is to meet my subjects first, talk to them, get to know them, and then little by little the camera gets attached to your hand and suddenly you are making pictures of a person that you care about; eventually you fall in love with them. You respect them. You want to be there to tell their important story. Trust your intuition.
4.) reciprocate I always try to give something in return. I print the pictures and give them to my subjects.
5.) finishing With discipline and patience I usually edit, sequence, tune the work, and write again. I normally send it to two or three colleagues that give me very honest feedback. Those people should be people that come from different backgrounds if possible. Mine are for example: a magazine editor, a newspaper editor, a book designer and architect and my semiology teacher from Toulouse. I trust them to tell me the truth, but I always trust my instinct in the end.
