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Maria has Down syndrome, autism and 6 fingers. She makes use of them to flash the heavy metallic signal on the digicam on a seashore, sun shades on, solely unbothered. That picture, taken by documentary photographer Carol Allen-Storey, conveys one thing important about Defying the Myth, the e-book she’s spent greater than a decade making. It’s not a file of struggling. It’s a file of individuals dwelling, in all of the difficult, joyful, exhausting fullness that entails.
Allen-Storey is an award-winning photographer who has spent her profession documenting complicated humanitarian and social points. Appointed a UNICEF ambassador for pictures in 2009, her earlier tasks embody work on rape as a weapon of battle and therapeutic after genocide. She is just not a photographer who tackles simple topics, or takes simple photos.
What distinguishes Defying the Myth from her earlier work, although, is the depth of the connection she constructed together with her topics, and the way in which that relationship formed the pictures itself.
Allen-Storey was on project for Save the Children when she photographed Shoulana, a single mom elevating a son, Mekhye, dwelling with extreme disabilities. What she discovered shocked her. A yr after the project ended, she went again.
Shoulana launched her to different households, the mission grew, and over time it grew to become one thing tougher to classify than a photographic mission: a group, a collaboration, in some respects a household. The e-book, which can be revealed by GOST this July, is the consequence.
Intimate distance
The technical approach is documentary in the classic sense: black and white, available light, shot close. Allen-Storey works at the intimate distance that trust allows, and you can feel it in the images.
There’s a photograph of Shoulana dancing in her kitchen, arms raised, one leg lifted mid-step, the whole frame filled with unselfconscious movement. There’s Kallan, Nicola’s son, wearing a dinosaur mask at the Natural History Museum, reflected in a glass case beside a dinosaur skeleton, the composition so exact it looks designed. There’s the beach image that leads this piece: Maria in white-framed sunglasses, hand raised, utterly at ease with the camera and the world.
These aren’t pictures taken of people. They’re pictures taken with people, and the distinction matters.
Allen-Storey’s long relationship with these families shows in the quality of access she has: the bathing routines, the hospital appointments, the epilepsy medication plans pinned to the fridge, the bedroom doors. The moments of absolute exhaustion and the moments of absolute joy. She photographs both with the same directness.
The book also contains drawings, collages, poems and written testimonies by the mothers and children themselves, which changes the dynamic considerably. This isn’t a photographer’s view of other people’s lives; it’s a collaboration in which the subjects have their own voice and their own visual language.
Technical lessons
For photographers, the technical lessons here are worth considering. Allen-Storey works consistently in black and white, which strips the images of the distraction that colour can introduce in complex domestic environments and puts the focus squarely on light, form and relationship.
Her framing is tight without being claustrophobic, and she handles low light with confidence, letting grain work for rather than against her. The hospital sequences in particular show what a long-term relationship with subjects makes possible: she’s in the room, close, without the images ever feeling intrusive.
All of the proceeds that Allen-Storey receives from the sale of the book go directly to the three families. It’s a small detail, but it says something about the kind of photographer she is, and the kind of project this has been.
Defying the Myth by Carol Allen-Storey is revealed by GOST Books, ISBN 978-1-80598-028-5, 104 pages. It’s presently obtainable for pre-order for $50/£40.
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