MOMENTUM
“I thought Saudi women do not have many rights, not allowed to drive, meant to stay home and cook so I wanted to challenge that stereotype. In the 1950’s society was very strict on what women could and could not do so I know by being a female boxer I would have challenged societies norms”.
– 1950’s , Saudi Female Boxer
The principle that we used to develop this project was migration and how it affects a person’s identity. A simple way to explain this is to place yourself in a situation where you were born or grew up in an alternative time and place. It was a trip into exploring how our cultures have integrated and almost created alter egos based on our experiences and our perceptions of the places we are from or where we want to go.
The first set of images represented each person’s imagined origin in the 1950s and a stereotype or issue that they wanted to challenge and was printed in cyanotype. They asked ‘If I had been born in 1951, who would I have been? The final set of images were collages that represented them in the present day but explored the cultural influences that changed their perception of themselves.
The final set of images represent us in the present day but by exploring our cultural influences we changed our perception of ourselves. This photography project was written by Junaid, a young migrant second generation who wanted to explore the concepts of physical movement, distance and personality in collaboration with professional photographer Ingrid Guyon. The young people from Refugee Youth wanted to produce a photography exhibition in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the UN Refugee Convention (1951 -2011) but also to provide an experience to the participants and explore our own cultures and the merger of cultures through migration.
