Bodies

2020 - Film and Photography - Ramzia Jawara

Ramzia Jawara is a photographer based in the UK working between fine art and documentary photography. She blends genres within photography to provoke conversation on contemporary issues in today's society and uses photography as a means to capture moments and passing thoughts that often go unnoticed or forgotten without a lens. With a background in performance, Jawara sees the studio as a ground to play and connect with the subject by bringing out qualities in a way that tells the story, with emphasis on visual dynamics. She also uses it to exhibit the body in relation to space. Her work as an incentive to provoke thought and make statements about the underlying issues of society. In recent works, Jawara focuses on the intricacies of human nature, particularly the existence of the human form and its affiliation with the masses in modern day society. Her goal is to communicate a spectrum of the most authentic emotions that are most present in the moment and are specific to each story; a universal entity that every person can relate to.

https://ayzmar.com/

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‘BODIES’ 

Text by Georgie Herst


Ramzia Jawara is a fine art and documentary photographer, who aims to provoke conversations about contemporary social issues. Her work is inspired by her surroundings, and to creating an emotional response to the world around her. Ramzia’s background in performance creates a direct response that forces her to play with the studio and relate her subject to the space in different ways. She has created strong and empowering imagery to provoke thoughts to her viewers and bringing to life topics of underlying political issues to tell her stories.


In her ongoing project Bodies, Ramzia questions the ways that humans have become lost inside of materialism and consumerism, and how this has made our relationships to nature distort. Her short film represents this completely, as she has created unique visuals with a warped, heavy, dark and melancholy feeling to them. The impact of the red filters and fisheye like lens creates a completely distorted image of the female body. She pays close attention to space, composition, colour and form, in a reaction against the capitalist rejection of our inner bodies. I find the project insightful and relatable to connotations of the mass media and how women are made to conform to these sometimes-unattainable body types. When looking at the project more closely you see Ramzia speak of the historical and religious context. It looks at the concept of the body being perceived as dirty in the context of female sexuality. Using her approach with dance and performance of the body this is emphasised and shows forms of embodiment and disembodiment throughout.


The use of her subject’s voice and music that is heard in the background of the film is an aspect that really stands out. Creating a space where these females are being brutally honest and raw to the camera. The red lights juxtaposed with chaotic imagery show themes of aggression, impulsiveness, lust and violence. The constant jumps and overlapping of stills that are seen you are reminded of the conflict between individual consciousness and the colonised mind. Her imagery throughout this project is really interestingly shot. She was inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s theory of total art; her photographs are shot in a red tent which connotates to feelings of restriction and the red reflecting the colour of all our internal organs and the human body as a whole. You see this in her short film with these almost aggressive like shots of a mouth wide open as if someone were to be screaming. I think it’s interesting to see Ramzia use herself as the subject playing with shape you see a range of movement through each image almost as if these were film stills too. I think using videography as a medium in this particular piece of work has been really successful. I wanted to include a quote which I think has been a major influence in her work and one she has spoken about.

“We are living in a zoo, or more accurately a farm, our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomised and disconnected”- Russell Brand

This quote to me is a perfect representation of the social issues Ramzia is trying to represent in her project. The way that we as human beings are expected to conform to rules and regulations. The focus here being on the body and primarily the female form. It’s the idea that we are all so constricted in how we hold ourselves. It’s about how we are all consumers constantly being reminded to buy more, look better and be better. We live in a digital age that is moving at such a rapid pace that I think sometimes we can’t all keep up. This piece has reminded me to look at our bodies and realise the amazing beauty it shows. To stop conforming to other people’s perceptions and to form a healthy relationship with it. The act of making her visuals not a normal idealised perception of beauty, she made it more aggressive and more invasive. This made me look at it and understand the real beauty that’s beneath all the other things. The things that people only see at face value that are just on the surface. But there is so much more to it.




Read Ramzia Jawara’s essay on Georgie Herst’s work HERE.