If you like photography, you've probably heard it being described as "painting with light". It's a phrase that's been in use for at least a century, but it's never felt more relevant than looking at this picture, which has just been named Photo of the Year at the Siena International Photo Awards.
Light is the first thing you see, and the thing that makes the biggest impression, as sun pours through patterned curtains into a small room. Then your eye moves right, past a wooden door, and you meet a woman's gaze.
Her name is Amina. She stands on the dark side of the door, half-hidden, her face framed by a black headscarf. She doesn’t smile.
Amina was captured by Italian photographer Stefano Rosselli in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, a country in the grip of a tyrannical government run by the Taliban. She lives with her mother, a sister and a brother. Her father was a driver and has been missing for two years.
It's a story Rosselli has heard again and again as he entered the homes of Afghan families: “families where the death or disappearance of men has left an unfillable void, silencing all hope.”
That loss hits hard in a nation where, as Rosselli puts it, women are “deprived of the right to work and their independence, the only weapons to change their destiny”. With no man in the house, the future is bleak. “Stories in Afghanistan all resemble one another,” he says, “marked by the awareness that a happy ending will rarely, if ever, be written.”
Dividing lines
What's impressive about this picture is how much it tells you, without actually telling you anything. The door divides the frame in two. On the left is an empty room. On the right is Amina, squeezed into a narrow strip of shadow. The light that floods the room barely reaches her face. As a visual metaphor for a life lived in the shadows, it couldn't be clearer.
The details only serve to emphasise this theme. The contents are sparse: a couple of trunks, a fan on the wall, fabric across the ceiling. The colors are restrained too, with the dusty pinks and golds of the curtains balanced by the cool grays of the wall and the deep black of her scarf.
Many images of suffering show their subjects looking away, which can make them feel passive. Amina meets the camera directly, and that makes the image both powerful and uncomfortable, in all the right ways.
Rosselli’s path to this moment is an unusual one. He spent 30 years working in advertising at agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, DLV BBDO and Leagas Delaney. Recently though, after years of portraying what he calls “a perfect world far from reality”, he felt the need to show the real world “without filters or censorship”.
Amina and the other winning images are on display until November 29 at exhibitions in Siena, Castelnuovo Berardenga and Sovicille, Italy. Find out more on the Siena Awards website.
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