Maria has Down syndrome, autism and six fingers. She uses them to flash the heavy metal sign at the camera on a beach, sunglasses on, entirely unbothered. That image, taken by documentary photographer Carol Allen-Storey, conveys something vital about Defying the Myth, the book she's spent more than a decade making. It's not a record of suffering. It's a record of people living, in all the complicated, joyful, exhausting fullness that entails.
Allen-Storey is an award-winning photographer who has spent her career documenting complex humanitarian and social issues. Appointed a UNICEF ambassador for photography in 2009, her previous projects include work on rape as a weapon of war and healing after genocide. She is not a photographer who tackles easy subjects, or takes easy pictures.
What distinguishes Defying the Myth from her earlier work, though, is the depth of the relationship she built with her subjects, and the way that relationship shaped the photography itself.
Allen-Storey was on assignment for Save the Children when she photographed Shoulana, a single mother raising a son, Mekhye, living with severe disabilities. What she found shocked her. A year after the assignment ended, she went back.
Shoulana introduced her to other families, the project grew, and over time it became something harder to categorise than a photographic project: a community, a collaboration, in some respects a family. The book, which will be published by GOST this July, is the result.
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 published by GOST Books, ISBN 978-1-80598-028-5, 104 pages. It's currently available for pre-order for $50/£40.
