Jeddah Diary

HafizHafiz tells the stories of Muslim women. Its photographer is herself Muslim, and she photographs women in Turkey as equals, with empathy. I pulled another photobook on the same subject from my shelf to read alongside it. This one is by a British photographer who looks at Muslim culture from an outsider’s perspective, with a gaze tinged by condescension and prejudice. Her photographs of Saudi women also portray real lives, but I find her viewpoint subtly skewed. The differences become readily apparent when the two books are viewed side by side.

In Saudi Arabia, women were legally required to wear a long black abaya and headscarf in public. Some of Arthur’s subjects did not wish to be photographed without their abayas, particularly if their faces were visible. In such cases, she rephotographed some of the prints using flash, allowing the glare to obscure their faces. The cover is one example.

Title: Jeddah Diary
Original title: Jeddah Diary
Photographer: Olivia Arthur
ISBN: 978-0956995919
Bookseller: Fishbar Gallery
Year: 2013
Limited edition: 1,000 copies
Price: CAD 720 on Amazon, May 17, 2023

There is so much space in Jeddah that there is no reason to build houses this close together, but they do. Then they put up impossibly high walls so the neighbours cannot see in.

In 2009, the British Council invited Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to teach a two-week photography workshop for women. She readily accepted, hoping she would also have a chance to pursue some work of her own. Photographs made during that stay and two subsequent trips were collected in her book Jeddah Diary.

If you pray at home, you have to cover yourself, so women keep prayer robes at home to slip on over their clothes. This is one of my students talking to a friend on the phone. I was drawn to the way she seemed to merge with the décor.

“I wanted to create a series that would offer people unfamiliar with this strange world a glimpse inside.”

Arthur found, however, that working as a photographer could be frustrating in an ultraconservative country with strict rules governing what women could and could not do.

Arthur was once berated in the street by a woman she had not even photographed.

Things were even harder for her students. “They could not necessarily get permission from their families to go out and photograph freely, but most of them found a way around it. One student took her husband along when she went out to shoot after he finished work,” Arthur said.

I made these photographs in a residence for professional women and students. It was a little like a boarding school. We were sitting around together in our pyjamas, and I showed them my website. They said, “This is wonderful. We would love to help, but we need to put on our abayas.” So at one in the morning, they put their abayas back on and posed for these photographs. It was an amusing moment.

I met this young woman near the end of my second trip. She was twenty-two and wanted to party all the time. Just for fun, she liked to sleep in a tent in her bedroom. She did not mind being photographed. “I don’t care what they say,” she told me. But I chose not to show her face because I knew she could get herself into a great deal of trouble—more than she realized.

Arthur also found the general suspicion of photography problematic: one woman was barred from the workshop for photographing her cousin, while another was arrested for taking pictures in public.

Arthur said that many foreigners who had lived in Saudi Arabia for years had never been invited into a Saudi home.

In this photograph, a friend of mine is standing on her younger brother to give him a massage. Women do not have to wear abayas around the house. In more conservative families, they may wear them in the presence of male cousins.

Teaching the workshop, however, allowed Arthur to make friends and eventually gain entry to their homes.

The houses in Jeddah are extraordinary, with a decorative style all their own. This room opens onto the living room, so from the sofa you look directly into this grotto with its pool.

But gaining access was only the first step. Arthur then had to find a way to photograph her subjects without violating their sense of modesty or making them uncomfortable.

This was taken on the campus of Effat University in Jeddah. While I was there, it had just been upgraded from a college to a university, and it admitted women only. The young women were extremely stylish in their abayas. I was probably the least fashionable woman in Saudi Arabia, and they despaired of me. They would say, “All right, Olivia, you’re going to put on some makeup, and we’ll teach you how to be feminine.”

Sometimes this meant witnessing extraordinary scenes without being able to raise the camera. At other times, it meant finding creative ways around social boundaries—photographing only a woman’s legs protruding from behind a wall, for example, or rephotographing certain images with flash so that the glare obscured her face.

On weekends, we would go to a seaside town called Durrat al-Arus. There were no religious police or other law-enforcement authorities there, so the women went to relax. It was a strange world, both inside Saudi Arabia and somehow outside it. You could wear whatever you wanted, even a bikini, though most women did not. This is Diana. She covered her hair and wore a special swimsuit, but she did not mind my showing her face.

“At first it was very frustrating. I thought I had all these photographs I could not use, and it took a long time to work out what to do with them.”

“In the end, though, I think it helped the work. It conveys the strangeness and impassive quality of life there,” she said.

Arthur certainly experienced the restrictive side of Saudi life: women were not permitted to drive and needed a male guardian’s permission for even such basic things as attending school or travelling.

Women in Saudi Arabia were not officially allowed to drive, so you would see many very young boys behind the wheel. Women taught their sons to drive as early as possible so that they could get around. Our car had just broken down, and we had to push it off the road while we waited for help. The boys were amazed that I knew how to drive and kept asking, “How does she know how to drive?”

But she also caught glimpses of a freer way of life, in which women had boyfriends and men had girlfriends, and women attended parties in residential compounds or private beach villas.

In fact, Arthur said that many of her students did not see their lives as unhappy or oppressive.

“They were usually very careful to say, ‘We have our own freedoms. We do what we like.’ Nearly all of them came from upper-middle-class families. Most did not need to worry about money or employment,” she said.

Although the young women loved to party, when Ramadan came they all fasted: no drinking, dancing, or smoking. This photograph was taken on the night before Ramadan began, so they were going a little wild. We were inside a gated compound and had just finished swimming at midnight. Behind closed doors, anything goes. The religious police did not seem to come in to see what was happening.

Arthur’s students often surprised her. After much encouragement from Arthur, one of the least experienced went out to photograph Indian workers. One day the police picked her up, and her father had to come and collect her. “She went back the next day, which really surprised me, because there was a particular photograph she wanted,” Arthur said. “Their lives are certainly very constrained, but some of these women are remarkably strong despite it all.”

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Note: The images are reproduced from the photobook and remain the copyright of the original photographer.

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