The Jordanian-American photographer Tanya Habjouqa first heard about the rally-driving women of the West Bank through one of her friends.  

A member of Rawiya, a collective of Middle-Eastern women photographers, she became immediately fascinated by these colourful women with their tough yet very feminine attitudes. She turned her photographic focus onto the questions of gender and representation and is today heavily engaged with portraying and exhibiting underrepresentation. 

"I’ve always felt that my anthropology has been my biggest problem – understood in the way that I always ended up being more engrossed in the representation, and the anthropologist inside me didn’t care for the mainstream media’s approach to representation(...)"

Tanya Habjouqa herself has a background as a cultural anthropologist and has previously written for international and Arab media. 

“I was always disturbed in my work by the many differences I could see around me – different images and different interpretations of reality. The result was that I became more and more occupied with the story. At the same time, I often felt that words alone could not do the stories full justice.” 

Words became pictures

The writer changed track and began to photograph, but even as a photographer for international media, Tanya Habjouqa remained unsatisfied with the way that she and other news media were portraying the world. 

"There is a greater variety to gender than shown in the types of pictures we normally see. I’m talking here about pictures of men who have been castrated, transsexuals, and also pictures of ‘normal’ men where the subtle differences among them are often underrepresented(...)

“I’ve always felt that my anthropology has been my biggest problem – understood in the way that I always ended up being more engrossed in the representation, and the anthropologist inside me didn’t care for the mainstream media’s approach to representation. I often felt uncomfortable with news coverage – and by the fact it was in some way or other not undertaken with more respect.”  

So Tanya Habjouqa took time off to reflect. The result of this ended up being a desire to create something less hasty; something that allowed space for, and showed more differences; something less lucrative, but something where she could put her anthropological understanding to good use. 

The answer was Rawiya

The Rawiya collective was founded in the autumn of 2009, at a time when Tanya was constantly being asked as a member of the collective when she would find herself a ’real job’. The collective’s members knew each other from working on the assignments that the minority group of women photographers in the Middle East undertook.  

In a broad perspective, the aim of the collective is to tell the story about that which is underrepresented in the region.   

“There is a greater variety to gender than shown in the types of pictures we normally see. I’m talking here about pictures of men who have been castrated, transsexuals, and also pictures of ‘normal’ men where the subtle differences among them are often underrepresented. Something else essential is joy, beauty and humour – all of which we want to portray as well, as it’s these things that are often lost with a highly politicised agenda. It’s not because we deny politics exist or are trying to produce a rose-tinted image of the world, because we also deal with things that make us angry and we show all of the nastiness and bleakness that there is too.”

A practical and professional collaboration

The work of the collective is partly practical and partly professional. Members share contacts, share knowledge and share experiences, and the number of joint exhibitions, publications and concepts continues to increase. 

 The collective’s name, Rawiya (which means a woman storyteller) was chosen with care and with a keen eye on marketing.  

“At the time, we decided that it was in our own interest to promote ourselves with the fact that we were women. This was, and remains, unusual, and it also relates to the content of what we do”, explains Tanya Habjouqa.  

And whether you like it or not, gender does influence how a person works as a photographer in the Arab and predominantly Muslim countries. It creates limitations, but also opens doors. 

“Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to take my gender into account. But I feel it a privilege to be a woman. I have access to places that would be difficult to come into as a man – probably because, as a woman, I’m viewed as less of a threat. I’m also invited into people’s private homes – by men – because they believe that it poses no problem for me as a woman to meet their wives and sisters.” 

And whether you like it or not, gender does influence how a person works as a photographer in the Arab and predominantly Muslim countries. It creates limitations, but also opens doors. 

There does however remain one area where gender creates a limitation – the Muslim pilgrim festival of Hajj.  

“For many years, I’ve longed to be able to take photographs during the Hajj, but in order for me to be able to do this, I require a male relative as a chaperone. But normally I find ways of working around such challenges,” concludes Tanya Habjouqa.