Maria Eugenia Jelincic

Traditionally, the image of woman in our culture has been mostly constructed without the creative participation of women. Women have served as models but men are the ones who have portrayed and defined us according to their points of view. The predominant images of women correspond to the way we have been viewed throughout history: yesterday as a muse; today as an instrument to promote a consumer society; the object of passion and illusions; the source of noble or condemnable sentiments. The figure of woman has served to prop up masculine projections of desire, imagination, sexuality and interests.

How have these images of women conditioned our behavior and limited our possibilities to develop as persons? Many studies (as well as our daily experiences) demonstrate the strength and the influence of these cultural molds and the difficulties of throwing them off.

This situation has as many negative effects on women's health as it has on the cultural level. Women often assume a series of roles in order to adjust to this externally-created model of identity. The reward is social acceptance. Deviation from or refusal of this model results in condemnation from society and guilt feelings on the personal level: for the crime of being different. This has resulted in a series of negative consequences for women's personal equilibrium. Many personal, "private" neuroses and problems of women in fact have social roots and, more specifically, are caused by identity conflicts.

Women's Images, Identity and Health

Wanting to do something about this, the Argentine photographer Alicia D'Amico has organized a series of experimental workshops on the image of women. These workshops have a twofold objective: to try to recover authentic elements of women's identities and to construct, on the basis of these elements, a new iconography of women which can express both the transformations women are going through and women's diversity a gender and as individuals. Utilizing a methodology of introspection, the workshops have been conducted with the collaboration of psychologists such as Liliana Mizrahi and Graciela Sikos. Together they try to bring out some of the deepest features of the identities of the participants to enable them to creativity themselves. These are later captured in photographic images.

In talking about the motivation behind this experience, Alicia D'Amico says:

"I believe that we must begin looking at ourselves and presenting ourselves as of a new series of images in which we feel that we are authentically reflected. One way of becoming the creators of our own images – images which correspond to our true identity and not to a model of women which does not represent us - is to begin by defining ourselves from the inside. We cannot diminish the importance of women's image. An image is a means of knowing and we can use it as an instrument to help change ourselves."

The Experience

These workshops are an invitation to express our diversity. According to Alicia D'Amico, we must look at ourselves differently from the way we have traditionally been viewed, given that women are different from men. Just as there is a masculine viewpoint, there is also a woman's viewpoint. She, personally, began this experience when she started to question her way of looking, her way of photographing. "I have always been photographing women," she recounts, "but the time came when I began to question my degree of commitment to what I was doing. I found that I needed to integrate my two greatest interests: photography and feminism. From that moment on, I began methodically and consistently photographing women."

On the techniques used for these photographs, Alicia D'Amico says: "I try to get a realistic photograph, using black and white film and natural light. I consider this an essential element because I feel that artificial light alters the atmosphere and changes the shadows... I try to find a sense of beauty by reflecting the energy and sensitivity expressed by each woman."

Since 1982, she has promoted the following workshops: Self-Portrait, Women's Identity, Image and Change, Women and Violence, and Women and Peace.

Gabriela Charnes, psychologist and member of Isis International, participated in the workshop on Image and Change during the First Latin American and Caribbean Women and Health Meeting held in Colombia in 1984. Gabriela describes the experience this way:

"In the first session, Alicia and a psychologist explain the various steps in the workshop. Then they propose that you make an outline giving the moments of change which you consider most important in your life and describe how and why these changes came about. This outline is a tool for your reflection. Afterwards you are to choose one of these moments and try to portray it with your image: with your gestures, with the expression of your face and with any other elements that you choose to bring out what you want to show. If you want, you may use costumes, objects, etc."

The next step is the photographing: all the participants gather in a room (there were about 30 women in the workshop on Image and Change). Each woman has a mirror in which to portray the image that she wants of herself on the photograph.

Gabriela recounts this experience:

"While you are looking in the mirror portraying the image you want of yourself, the psychologist begins a dialogue with you and Alicia takes photographs. This is a moment of intense emotion and some women cry. It is a situation of release and of emotional identification. Although each woman chooses a very personal situation to portray, other women have experiences similar moments. I remember, for example, that one woman wanted to depict the time when she was pregnant and dressed herself up like this. Another woman did not want to be portrayed alone and asked all of us to join her in the photograph. Another woman portrayed herself with a suitcase. Personally, these portrayals of others revealed things having to do with moments in my own life."

As the final step, there is a meeting in which the photographs are given out. All the participants come and comment on these images. Do these photographs really say something different from how each of us usually sees ourselves or how others see us?

Each woman describes the feelings aroused by looking at this image of herself and what she thinks of the experience in general. When she saw her photograph, Gabriela Charnes wrote the following:

"Don't touch me! I want to hide. I never thought it would be so difficult to look at myself. To face my own image and accept it. These photographs perfectly express the feelings that I wanted to express in that moment... seeing them strengthens me."

Another woman, Haydee, who participated in the workshop entitled Self-Portrait wrote:

"The exercise of bodily expression allowed me to reconnect on a deep level with my own time. The pain began to come out. I began to search beyond daily experience into my face. What did it tell me? What did it have to do with me? What did it show? Looking at myself in the mirror, I felt the depth of the circles under my eyes, and the line of my lips. They showed pain. I decided to put myself in the mirror, deeper inside...my eyes filled with tears."

Reflecting upon this experience with greater objectivity today, Gabriela Charnes feels that this type of work, if carried out systematically with a group, could be useful for some kinds of mental health therapy. She says:

"I think that experiences such as this one really represent an important contribution for recovering our true identity as women and that this is a necessary step for preserving women's health. If health means having the possibility to use our maximum physical and psychological potential, to use our own self in an optimal way, it is clear that this level of health is less accessible to women.

"A primary cause of this situation lies in the numerous contradictions that arise when we adjust to the cultural model imposed upon us. Because of this, I believe that it is essential for women to learn to identify our own rights, express our own opinions, desires and needs. Women must be capable of expressing our own feelings, without contradictions. This is the only way we will be able to accept ourselves and build our self-esteem.

"As far as women's identity goes, I believe that we are in a stage of transition today. All of us are experiencing an inner confrontation between the traditional ways of thinking and the construction of new forms of relationships. In this context, Alicia D'Amico's experience is positive in its attempt to recover the fragments of an identity which is under construction."

Some Observations

How useful and practical this sort of experience is depends on the context in which it is carried out and on whether or not it is systematically used. Beyond the practical level, this type of experiment stimulates reflection in the importance, in working with women, of complementing research methods based on individual introspection with those that give priority to the social context.

The relationship of image and identity also emerges, in a different way, in a great many other Latin American experiences based on social analysis. In these experiences we see how images which reflect women's true situations can become the basis on which to increase women's value in their own eyes and in the eyes of others, outside of the traditionally accepted framework.

The results of an audiovisual produced by a group of working class women in Peru shows the capacity of images to bring certain situations into an objective light.

In the women's project "Nuevo Despertar" (New Awakening) of the Centro de Estudios y Documentacion (Study and Documentation Center) CIED, in Lima, Peru, an audiovisual was made documenting the support given by the women of Minas Canaria to the struggle of the mining union, made up exclusively of men. In the audiovisual - Asi Luchamos las Mujeres de Canaria (how we women of Canaria are struggling), the miners' wives give testimony of their actions and experiences.

What effect did this audiovisual have on the women of Minas Canaria? In a letter to Isis International, CIED writes:

"When the women of Minas Canaria saw themselves in the audiovisual they felt important because they were the protagonists of a film about real life. Seeing their images in the pictures, they relived their struggles and their experiences and they came to value their actions and participation more highly. This shows, in a way, that external mediation is needed for women to value themselves.

"Another important aspect to point out, is that when their husbands and the union saw the audiovisual it made them think about and recognize the participation of their wives in the struggle. Before this, their appreciation had not been explicit.

"Finally, when we showed the audiovisual to women in other mining camps, they identified with it and on the basis of these images they began to reflect on the value of their own participation."

Today women from diverse cultural contexts are using images, in various forms, to express themselves. Many are using audiovisuals. These images truly give another vision of women: one that criticizes existing molds; proposes new forms of relationships that take account of women's ways of feeling and thinking; demands recognition of their real contribution to society which, in practice, goes beyond the domestic sphere; demands equal opportunities in society without, however, identifying with the predominant masculine values. ...

In an alternative model of women emerging from all this? We do not believe so. What is emerging is rather the wealth of our multiplicity - as well as those points we have in common, in spite of our differences.