Chronicling Conflict

By Ben Bush, Bitch Magazine. Posted June 18, 2005.

When Mimi Chakarova was in Ghana working on a photojournalism project, someone in a car full of young men grabbed the strap of her camera bag and attempted to drive off with it. Chakarova wouldn’t let go of the camera case, and was dragged behind the car for half a block until the case’s double-stitched strap broke. “I just couldn’t stand the thought of some German tourist buying my Leica for $100,” she says.

Chakarova, a documentary photographer who teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, is currently immersed in two long-term projects, one documenting the military standoff in Kashmir and the other focusing on the sex trafficking of women in Eastern Europe. Born in Bulgaria under communism, Chakarova grew up in a village “running barefoot and playing with the chickens.”

When she was 13, her family traveled to Baltimore, Maryland, on a three-month exchange program sponsored by her father’s research position at Johns Hopkins University. Chakarova spoke no English, and the inner-city public school she attended classified her as developmentally disabled.

As a teenager, she worked three jobs in order to afford her first camera, which allowed her to communicate visually rather than verbally. She went on to study fine-arts photography, receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, but she became frustrated with the endless introspection of the art world and turned to journalism, finding the field’s outward gaze refreshing.

Chakarova, who is now 29, has traveled all over the world, documenting living conditions and human rights in Africa and the Caribbean for her graduate thesis, and shooting the daily lives of Cubans surviving in the country’s two rival economies—the black market and withering communism—in photos that are featured in the book Capitalism, God, and a Good Cigar: Cuba Enters the Twenty-First Century.

“My mother asked me recently, ‘Mimi, it’s taken us so long to get out of poverty, why do you keep going back?’” Chakarova recalls. “I said, ‘Because it’s so familiar, Mom.’”

Kashmir

The disputed region of Kashmir, located on the borders of the two nuclear powers of India and Pakistan, has suffered an estimated 85,000 fatalities as a result of the conflict hinging on the national and religious strife between the Hindu and Muslim countries. Flare-ups between regional militants and Indian troops stationed in the region create a climate of perpetual war.

Chakarova’s photos of Kashmir, which were exhibited at the San Francisco World Affairs Council of Northern California this past winter, depict a world of torture, forced relocation, decimated villages, and traumatized civilians. Chakarova focuses on the war’s impact on civilians, specifically women, whom she believes disproportionately bear the brunt of the war’s hardship.

In one photo, beds are lined up across the front lawn of a psychiatric hospital. The facility is filled beyond capacity, as the war results in not only physical injuries but also cases of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The text accompanying the exhibit explains that women in the region attempt suicide with an unusual frequency—on average, five to seven attempts per day are recorded. (In hopes of forgiveness, attempts are most frequent on Fridays, the holiest day of the week in Islamic tradition.) Most choose to consume organophosphorus pesticides used in agriculture.

A young woman working in rural development, quoted in the exhibit, declares, “I am fighting a war on two fronts; I am fighting a patriarchal society and also dealing with the conflict that’s existed here since I got out of school.”

After photographing a massacre that included women, children, the elderly, and the disabled, Chakarova chose to exhibit only a photograph of the evidence left behind. After the 23 bodies were removed for burial, a flip-flop leaned against the padded armrest of a crutch, and a woman’s shoe rested against a dark stain of blood on the autumn leaves of the forest floor. Because viewers are already inundated with violent images, Chakarova prefers to capture and display those that raise questions, rather than titillate with shock value.

Ben Bush is a frequent contributor to XLR8R, Kitchen Sink, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Portland Mercury.

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