![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132681/PAR411549.jpg)
Annons
Olivia Arthur: Well, it was a bit of a jump. I was working at the student newspaper, which got me into taking photos. I had enjoyed photography before that, but working there I started taking it more seriously. I won the Guardian Student Media Award and thought, 'Oh, maybe I can make a career out of this.' People try to make a connection between the Maths degree and photography, but really they are just two very different things. I was more interested in the real world than the abstract, in the end.After I finished university I went to India. I didn't go out and do anything big; I just went there and started working, shooting small bits for magazines and newspapers, mainly British titles.In what way do you think your early career in India directed your work?
I think I learned to be a photographer in India. Which obviously shaped what I have done since. In terms of photography, India is obviously a very hectic, colourful and chaotic place, and while there I switched to medium format, which is a lot quieter and stiller. I think I was trying to see through all that chaos to something calmer. Also, in terms of subject matter, my time there led me to a couple of years – well, many years – of working on projects on women.
Annons
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132682/PAR411527.jpg)
No. That was something I have gone back since to do, and is ongoing. I did do a fair bit of work in Kashmir the first time round, which certainly initiated my thoughts on working on women.When you mention your projects on women, are you referring to your book project, Jeddah Diary, or Middle Distance?
Well, Middle Distance was the project that was directly influenced by my time in India. After India, I was in Italy doing my residence at a place called Fabrica. I wanted to start working on this project about women at the points of crossover between East and West. The project itself was about the border between Europe and Asia – that was the starting point – but ultimately it was about the stories of different women I met on my journey along that border. Off the back of that I ended up going to Iran and then to Saudi Arabia. I want to make this earlier work into a book as well, but Saudi Arabia was more of a concise part of the project involving a relatively small number of people, that became Jeddah Diaries.Saudi Arabia is a famously cloistered society, at least in the eyes of Western observers, and especially when it comes to the lives of women. Jeddah Diaries conveys both that cloistered aspect, but also a rarely depicted relaxed side to the life of women there. I assume it was a very difficult project to do?
I didn't really go with an expectation of what it would be like. But it was the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. At some points, I was ready to give up. One thing that helped my access was that I was teaching a workshop there for women photographers, that was a great help, but it's not a place where you can meet someone in the street and take photos, you can't do that at all. As a woman I could be invited into the home and could see these inner worlds.
Annons
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132684/LON141050.jpg)
It’s terribly closed there, and even when you get inside this closed world, you can then take pictures that you then can’t use. There are so many layers of complication, sets of rules about what you can and cannot show, and just as you think you have understood it, there’s some different version of the rules. It became very confusing.That’s what I tried to do with the book, to show people the journey I had been on. Not to say: “Saudi Arabia is like this and this,” but to say, “It CAN be like this and it can be like this,” drifting into these different worlds I saw while I was there. That’s something that I think people forget when they talk about a place like Saudi Arabia – they try to put it all under one big banner. Everyone’s really conservative, or everyone’s having these crazy parties. And it's not true, there are very different worlds, and some people cross between these worlds, these separate bubbles.Some of the photos in the book, you chose to obscure the faces by re-photographing prints with glare on the faces. It sounds like a compromise, but I guess it works with the book's whole subject to convey that world and the pressures in it?
It was absolutely not something I planned on doing. But yes, in a way it re-emphasises that point. I went through this process of taking a lot of photos, and realising I couldn't use them. And it took me a long time to figure out how to do it. Could I blur the faces? Or can you cut them out? I didn't want to use black marker and make them look like criminals. It took a long time to come up with it. I think it works, it’s quite soft, and it retains that closeness and at the same time offers anonymity. People might find it odd, but yes, I think it explains their situations well. The contradictions between intimacy and actually being quite far away.
Annons
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132685/LON103910.jpg)
Obviously, as countries, they are so very different. What you have in Iran is long-standing Western influence. A large middle class in Tehran who are very aware, very self aware and very much in touch with the West. They don't live in that "bubble" in the way that people in Saudi Arabia do. Saudi Arabia is a younger country; the Western influence is more recent. In Iran, the women I met know what they think and they aren't afraid to say what they think, they are far more confident and tougher.In Iran you also have a much tougher ruling system. The problem there is whether the police will stop you taking photos, whether they see you as a threat and so on. I found that less of a worry in Saudi Arabia; the religious police there might tell me to put my headscarf on but they seemed more concerned with privacy than my being a threat to security or political danger. The people themselves in Saudi are more likely to judge you, and actually to judge each other when it comes to photography. People are worried about what others think of them, it’s a small society, and that’s a concern for people.
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132686/LON103900.jpg)
Is there a link? I don't know. I started doing work about women because, I suppose, I was surprised or moved by what I had seen in India – what was expected of them and how they were treated. The work about the caste system obviously came out of my time there, so I suppose it's connected in a way, but each thing is different.
Annons
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132688/LON103911.jpg)
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132689/LON103894.jpg)
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132690/LON103912.jpg)
Annons
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132692/LON103868.jpg)
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132693/LON103869.jpg)
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132696/LON103883.jpg)
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132697/LON103872.jpg)
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132698/PAR411535.jpg)
![](https://assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/132699/PAR411547.jpg)