My series The Spiral of Containment was about translating how people are made to feel after being raped. It tried to express trauma through the realm of the imagination, using the language of magical realism. I met with and talked to survivors to attempt to understand how they thought about their trauma. Then I would sketch potential images that could express their story.
It felt obvious that if I was going to ask somebody to trust me, I had to have skin in the game. I couldn’t just say: “I’m going to translate how that makes you feel. I’ll make a drawing, we’re going to shoot it, and it’s going to work.” I had to be clear: this has happened to me, too. This is why I’m doing it. I’m in it with you.
Naively, I assumed everyone I interviewed would have a similar image they associated with their rape. Mine, for example, was an image of broken wings. But some people talked about being in a cage surrounded by lions. One described a red convertible classic car. The woman in this photo had a strikingly different image, one whose power I felt immediately. “I feel like I’m always going to be standing at the edge of the abyss with a broken dress,” she said. The dress represented her career, her relationships, everything she felt was going well – and everything she felt had been ripped away from her.
I started thinking about how to build the shot. First, I needed an abyss. I hunted through Google Maps and eventually found a giant tower called Ponte City in the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s a very unusual building, and not just because of the architecture. It was built for the elite: wealthy individuals who wanted incredible views of the city. But in this deeply fractured country, the area surrounding the tower became impoverished and crime levels soared. Drug-dealers moved in. Several storeys of rubbish accumulated in the belly of the building.
New owners are today trying to restore it. They gave me permission to shoot there but it was a huge task. From the inside, we had to cut through padlocks to gain access via a small window to the inner balcony. I took bolts of fabric – 200 metres of Indian cotton and rope – up to the roof, some 18 storeys higher up. Each had to be dropped down on to the balcony then rigged to different sections of the building’s inner ring.
All the windows in the central tower were fused shut and none were clean enough to shoot through. The building managers had to saw one open to give me my frame. I had very little room for manoeuvre. It was just me, my camera and my tripod. I remember thinking: “I just hope this works.”
As soon as I framed the shot, all the pieces fell into place. The woman looked incredible and I knew I had the image I needed. But the reason I love this photo has little to do with the fact that it was a feat to put together. What mattered most was how it affected this woman. As we walked out of the shoot, she said to me: “Do you mind if we call the image The Kingdom?” I didn’t understand: why would she want to call it that? She explained that, standing there, moving all of these broken pieces of her past represented by the dress, she felt like she was commanding them back into life. “I felt like the queen of my own kingdom,” she said.
That crystallised why I love working in this way. So much of photojournalism feels like taking someone’s story. Witnessing and recording history are important, but this series let me use my camera to forge a symbiotic relationship with the people I was shooting and allow them to take power back. So much of trauma is about power being taken away. These people got to express their story in a way that made them feel more empowered. It was healing – for them and for me.
In making this series, I had heard many different stories from many cultures, religions and genders but I was struck by how little it mattered what culture each survivor came from. The impact was so often the same: there is something universal about the contours of trauma.
But the series also built a community. I’m still in touch with many, including the woman in this image. Late last year, we caught up, five years since the shoot. She told me that creating this image was the moment she felt like she went from victim to survivor.
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Elisa Iannacone’s CV
Born: Mexico City, Mexico, 1988.
Trained: York University in Toronto, Canada; City University, London.
Influences: “Ellen Kuras, Tim Walker, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.”
High point: “Every time I get that ‘Yes!’”
Low point: “Trying to get funding for personal projects and finding endless closed doors.”
Top tip: “Everyone wants to put you in a box: if you shoot narrative, you don’t shoot doc; if you shoot conflict, you don’t shoot creative art. I reject that. Everything I’ve ever shot informs the next thing. When I shot weddings as a student, I learned skills I could apply to shooting in conflict areas. And when I shot conflict, I learned about human psychology, which works for narrative work. Also: listen to your gut! You might get hundreds of ‘No’s’, but if you believe in something strongly enough, don’t quit. You’ll find your way to that ‘Yes’ and it will propel you forward.”
Elisa Iannacone is a Canon Ambassador
