A number of South African women are featured in an international exhibition that opened in New York this week, celebrating inspirational women from around the world.
200 WOMEN – Who will Change the Way You See the World – is a book and multimedia project founded on original interviews where women, among them Winnie Madikizela Mandela, June Steenkamp and Graca Machel among others, are asked five fundamental questions about what is important to them in their lives and includes photographic portraits and video interviews designed to provoke thought around issues of diversity, empowerment and equality.
An intimate portrait of women: from a United States Supreme Court Justice, a Hollywood actor and activist to a widowed goat herder married at the age of 8 in Nepal.
Culminating in this kaleidoscope of stories that germinated while the publishers were working in South Africa.
Co-creator and publisher Ruth Hobday explains: “I kept having these conversations with people when I was there about the terrible gender inequity that exists in South Africa, doesn’t matter where you come from, the gender inequity is just massive and I always was told but that is so far down the list of problems we have to fix – housing, we have to fix health, we have to fix employment – and it’s like why are all of those things more important than gender equality and why are they more important than the way women and children are being treated. So it started from there.”
Ruth, along with partner Geoff Blackwell and their team travelled to multiple countries to interview and photograph their subjects: women of power, others of struggle, all trying to change their circumstance and that of other women for the better.
“Very early on I said just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean to say they make the cut, to me you had to have been somebody who actually is actively part of the conversation, is actively out there trying to change the worlds but even if its their little world and people in their immediate environment, if they’re actively speaking out against these things or trying to change people’s views, that to me was very important.”
They asked each woman five questions – what really matters to you, what brings you happiness, what would you change if you could, which word do you most identify with and what do you regard as the lowest depth of misery – the latter question put to the late Winnie Madikizela Mandela in this 2016 interview.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela saying , “A lot of things still cause a lot of pain and have actually made me realize actually how short life is, you know the patriarchy of society, particularly in SA where women are not only culturally oppressed but oppressed by their past because during the apartheid era women were of the lowest rung in society.”
“She was a real hero for me because I felt like a knew her so well because having worked on so many books on Nelson Mandela’s life and I’d never ever met her, so for me it was like meeting this icon which for me was just an amazing experience. But what was really lovely was that she was so welcoming and warm and here’s this woman who’s been just this fighter all her life and this really strong activist and it was just all about the same thing, just love and family and relationships.”
The videos and photography were produced by this Auckland based photographer who specializes in social and domestic photo essays.
Photographer Kieran E. Scott says, “Stylistically, I was very interested in the work of Avedon and Irving Penn from the 50s, 60s and 70s and they did a lot of work in a similar way – a long form documentary work where a sense of environment had been stripped away and you were left just to explore the character of the person in front you without any distractions and so I employed that technical construct and then the philosophical idea of democracy, brought that along with me.”
Resulting in images like this – the subject juxtaposed on plane linen canvas.
“We even chose the linen that we carried with us in a roll, based on Gandhi’s robes which Gloria Steinam was involved with the talking circles in India in her early life and that inspired us to use that calico coloured linen that is behind each of the women.”
This Chef from Katlehong, Nomvula Sikhahkane was abused by her stepfather from the age of 6 and answers the question “what really matters to you?”
“My step dad used to abuse me sexually, emotionally, that type of stuff and so this one time I was sitting with my friend and her mom and I was like to them. So if an old man decides to take off your underwear and does something like this, is it normal? And then the mother replied, no that’s wrong, shouldn’t be doing that to a child.”
Answering the same question, this former journalist Sahm Venter remembers covering Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.
“We waited, waited, it was a very hot day and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden you saw this grey hair with a halo behind it and this fist in the air and it was him, I couldn’t believe it. When the crew came down I almost got hit because I just stood there, I couldn’t believe it, so that was the pinnacle of my entire career really that he finally came out.”
Hobday says women now have the confidence and the support to really speak out about these issues.
“We wanted to add to the conversation. When we first started we had no idea that we would end up publishing into an environment of Donald Trump, MeToo, TimesUP, we actually thought we were going to be publishing with the first female president – like yay – we were actually interviewing women the day the locker-room tapes came out and I wasn’t at those interviews but apparently the women were just so angry, they were just raging and I think the silver lining that you can take out of that is that actually that has ignited and accelerated the conversation and it’s ramped it right up so people now feel that they have the confidence and the support to really speak out about these issues and I don’t think we would have go there without Trump.”
The exhibition runs at the Pen and Brush Gallery in Manhattan until June 30th before moving to Sweden and Germany later this year.
