Gender and photography in Saudi Arabia:

A Photography Professor Struggles With

 Saudi Culture in Transition

 

Galya Al-Ansary

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By : Ursula Lindsey

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Grappling with a different culture is often part of the challenge, and appeal, of teaching abroad.

But imagine going to a country where many consider your discipline sinful or criminal, to teach a group of students whose freedom of movement is very limited. That's what Janice Levy

One Saudi student's final project for her photography class contrasted the stylized prestige of men's photographs hanging in a portrait studio with the mundane tools of photo production, visible in the foreground and in reflections.

embarked upon last year when she took a job teaching photography at a women's university in Saudi Arabia.

"It's not for everyone, obviously," says Ms. Levy, a Boston native with short salt-and-pepper hair and a friendly, outspoken manner. Her year has been difficult, disorienting, and exhausting. But it's also been, she says, "the most rewarding teaching experience of my life. And I think that's because you can make such an impact in such a small amount of time."

Ms. Levy was on leave from Ithaca College, where she is a professor of photography. She has taken students on trips to Antigua, the Dominican Republic, and Madagascar, and she first traveled to Saudi Arabia in early 2010 to give a workshop on leadership to female deans. It was during that trip that administrators invited her to come to this capital city to teach introductory photography at Princess Noura bint Abdulrahman University. The class is a requirement in the all-women's university's newly established College of Art and Design.

When Ms. Levy started teaching last fall, most of her students had never picked up a camera before. And they weren't sure why they should.
should.

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Lama Al-Arady

A student at Princess Noura bint Abdulrahman U. photographed a cluster of switches and outlets in response to an assignment that asked, "What is the same and what is different?"

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Janice Levy

When she started teaching in Saudi Arabia, Janice Levy (above) was surprised by her female students' lackadaisical approach.

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Arwa Al-Rashed

One student photographed a Filipina woman who works in her family's dental clinic. A cultural suspicion of photography limited the students' subjects, especially at first.

Because education for women is still relatively new in Saudi Arabia, says Ms. Levy, "young women don't have a sense of what their education is going to do for them. Initially I was very surprised by students' lack of seriousness: They were always late, perpetually texting on their phones, didn't take notes ... I didn't imagine I would have to teach them to study, to respect the teacher. I had to give them pep talks."

The gist of those pep talks: You are the first generation of female Saudi photographers, and the world is eager to see what you have to say.

The professor had a "big impact," writes Yasmeen Al Barrak, her teaching assistant, in an e-mail. "Most of the students were looking at photography as a hobby rather than a job or an art that they can study, and [in which] they can be a successful artist."

Yet even once Ms. Levy's students became enthusiastic about their work, they faced difficult questions: Where could they photograph? And whom?

In a country where many consider all portraiture forbidden by Islam, and where no one but a woman's close relative is even supposed to see her face, students could find few willing subjects and were extremely reluctant to have their own pictures taken. "If I even picked up my camera and pointed it at one of the students to demonstrate something, they flinched," says Ms. Levy. Eventually students—whose faces Ms. Levy always digitally blurs—came to trust her.

Stepping Out

In their first assignments, says Ms. Levy, the women in her class photographed what was safe and close at hand. "I was seeing a lot of pictures of cellphones and stuffed animals," she says. "Feet is another thing they photographed a lot. And I was seeing a lot of photographs taken from car windows. I said: No, no, no."

A lot of her students, Ms. Levy explains, "didn't feel comfortable leaving their homes" and heading into the streets to take pictures. Saudi women are required to be accompanied almost everywhere by male guardians and—especially in pedestrian-unfriendly Riyadh—tend to circulate in chauffeured cars. A woman on the street is likely to attract the unwelcome attention of unknown men or of the religious police.

In Saudi Arabia, Ms. Levy herself discovered, "people are unaccustomed to seeing people taking pictures ... you don't see anyone walking around with a camera. So the first question is going to be, Why is this person taking pictures?"

The suspicious attitude toward photography is a combination of religious, cultural, and political factors. Islam forbids idolatry and the representation of the human form; Saudis are particularly sensitive to any violations of privacy, especially when it comes to women; and the absolute monarchy's repressive police apparatus tightly monitors all public space.

Yet with the advent of cellphones with built-in cameras, many Saudis are now used to snapping photos (so much so that at weddings and other celebrations guests are asked to hand in their phones at the door). In 2006 a royal decree authorized photographing "tourist sites, architectural landmarks, and shopping malls as well as government buildings where there is no sign banning photography." But many policemen seem to be unaware of the decree. Photographing private residences and individuals without permission can provoke angry reactions.

Ms. Levy was detained once after she took a photograph of a man napping on the ground, and a bystander called the police. She was released without charges. Several of her students were questioned by bystanders and police, and one—despite carrying a letter from her university—had her camera's memory card confiscated.

For her students, Ms. Levy says, "there is a certain amount of fear. They have to move out of that little safe bubble." She says she kept telling them: "The more you're out there photographing, the more common and accepted it will become."

Ms. Al Barrak said the professor's "vital and dynamic" style of teaching "was very different from what we have in our college." Ms. Levy had a hands-on approach, says the teaching assistant, and shared her passion for photography and her own work with the students.

Eventually, Ms. Levy says, most of the young women got out of their houses and out of their cars and produced work that justified her faith in them. One student photographed a Filipina woman who works in her family's dental clinic. Others visited low-income neighborhoods and schools. Ms. Levy took her class on a field trip to the coastal city of Jeddah and also set up a project in which her students taught disabled children what they had learned. She has organized exhibitions of her students' work in Saudi Arabia and Europe.

Practical Difficulties

Princess Noura University, where Ms. Levy worked, is the kingdom's premier women's-only university and was planned to accommodate up to 40,000 students. Established in 2007, it is in the process of relocating to a new, sprawling campus on the edge of Riyadh. Like many Saudi institutions of higher learning, the university is busy recruiting faculty from outside the country and establishing new departments and programs.

Arriving at the College of Art and Design, Ms. Levy says, she faced "practically insurmountable difficulties" (although she seems to have surmounted them all). Though the administration says all courses will eventually be taught in English, many of Ms. Levy's students hardly spoke any, and Ms. Al Barrak had to act as translator. Her lab did not have the computers, software, and printers she'd been promised. There weren't enough of the cameras she'd requested. The administration ordered books that she had told them would be unsuitable. Since the new campus—and the faculty housing it contains—was unfinished, she lived in a one-room apartment on a dusty road across from the old campus.

"We had to do everything from scratch," says the college's dean, Yasser Balila. "All the furniture, all the equipment, all the staff members. It wasn't easy." He says that the new campus, scheduled to open this fall, will have all the necessary facilities as well as faculty accommodations. "Everything will be there," he says.

Ms. Levy describes less-material challenges as well. A colleague was fired two weeks into the semester, leaving her to teach 100 students. And while she was happy about the support Dean Balila gave her, she felt she ruffled the feathers of other administrators by openly criticizing the program's flaws and suggesting improvements.

"I'm somebody that likes to make things happen quickly," says Ms. Levy. "When I arrived, I knew I had a limited amount of time and I had all these ideas. But in Saudi Arabia change happens very slowly. In hindsight I see that my style ... can be very disconcerting to some people."

Mr. Balila says that the professor had to get used to "a different academic environment." He notes that he met regularly with Ms. Levy to hear her views and that he appreciated receiving "really good advice from somebody not from Saudi Arabia—on how to improve the program, what skills students are lacking, what is the difference between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia."

Those differences had a huge impact on the photography program, Ms. Levy says. Even as the university was setting it up, she believes, administrators were ambivalent about the program's value and goals. Photography was a requirement; yet at the university's inauguration, cameras were forbidden. "What kind of a message are you sending?" asks Ms. Levy. "Are you embracing it or not?"

She believes the challenges she encountered as a teacher reflect "the kind of challenges going on politically and culturally in the country." In her view, Saudis feel that "'We want to maintain a sense of who we are and what our values are. We also want to embrace things that are new.'"

Ms. Levy left Riyadh at the end of June. She hopes that some of her Saudi students will be able to come study with her in the United States, and she would like to return at some point. "I believe that photography is a just a vehicle to get people thinking about their world," she says. In Saudi Arabia, "there's so much to photograph and so much to think about."