Red Light | Dark Room: Sex, Lives and Stereotypes

I’m desperate for my camera. I thought I’d gotten used to not having it, but the photograph has just been handed to me. A perfectly aligned gift, and I feel sick at not being able to take it with me. Sure, I can use words to describe how her prison issue mullet complimented the blue tracksuit she wore, and the brief imprint her hand left when she pressed it to the thick glass that separated us, but it would speak so much more profoundly as an image. One instantly readable, poignant picture of how her life, and her 20-year drug habit, has led her to sitting, sunken but flawlessly framed, behind the barrier that designates her a dangerous prisoner.

But I can’t have my camera in the jail, a state that has been so often the case in the past few months - a big red DENIED stamped over the shutter.

I’ve been working with street sex workers on what is allegedly a photographic project[1] and the reality is there is lots of places a camera can’t go. It can’t walk with me into the Children’s Court where I spend a day sitting with one of the women, lending her my company while she fights for custody of her three-week-old daughter. I can’t document the woman I visit in the high dependency unit in the psych ward. I can’t go into a police interview room with it. And now I can’t take the image of a woman left diminished in her prison uniform; a shaky lip and arms carved with scars and tattoos, the visible remnants of her outside life.

© Gemma-Rose Turnbull

The lack of photographing has also been about gaining trust. It’s taken me a long time to get the women comfortable in my presence, let alone in front of my gaze. They scamper, startled, if I pull it out too soon, or push it too far. And I can understand. They are a group of people who are among the most victimised and vilified in our society. Identity is one of the only, very small, powers they can wield. And before they hand their visage over to me, they need to trust I am going to honour that gift. And it’s painstaking; six months in, the camera still lies dormant for longer stretches than I’m comfortable with.

And because I have no idea what else to do, I’ve started to write, and write, and write. And it’s a totally different creative process. I’m used to shooting quickly; an immediate fast-paced thing, but this writing business takes brewing. Now I’m trying to absorb everything I see and my brain ends up too full; I can’t unravel a beginning, middle or end. I’m driven outside to walk off the hash of experiences, aligning them into a tangible, edible shape. I pace the St Kilda boardwalk, cold whipping tears from my eyes, and see the image of myself reflected in the sunglasses of the people I pass; brow furrowed and mumbling, half formed sentences on my lips. I appreciate the eccentricity of the suburb in which I live - I’m not the only oddity.

The words are partially my way of adding to this project, staving off the feeling that without all these uncaptured images it is a futile exercise, each paragraph effectively stemming the flow of panic that rises in my chest. But they are also partially therapy; my way of working through the things I see, and the stories I hear. I contort those dismal visions into sentences that go some way to articulating how hard it is being here, but also how rewarding.

And although the process stretches and pushes me, I grow to love the simplicity of them. How easily my eyes can absorb, no intrusive camera needed. I discover that sometimes the adage that a picture tells a thousand words isn’t true. Sometimes you need the meticulously crafted sentence to tip you into the desperation of the world in which I’m walking. I see how powerfully words can be used to draw painful parallels to my own life – I write how the little boy, standing, body cocked and quivering, waiting for his mum to emerge in her green prison jumpsuit, is the same size and shape as my eldest nephew. I write about their reunion; the way my breath catches when I see his small body reach a shaky crescendo of emotion as the guard leads her to him, forcing me to bite away the hot tears that rise in my eyes.

Later his Mother runs from window to window to catch the very last glimpse of her son, waving and smiling until he is gone from sight. As she walks back to her cell I see her wipe her eyes, waiting until he can’t see her to cry, I see my sister in her place and again my tears rise. The resonance that is delivered by recounting this with the written word becomes bigger than a photograph, because after all this is my story too; my experience shaping what I choose to record and why it means something to me.

© Gemma-Rose Turnbull

I seem to be more present somehow, more involved, when I am making an observation instead of a picture. Because although framing, metering and exposing is second nature to me now, it still remains an intrusion on my peripheral vision, channeling my focus. This interaction between the mother and her child happens as I am visiting one of the sex workers I know, chatting in the corner of the visiting room (which I note looks more like a highway service station than what I imagined a prison to look like). If I’d had my camera focused on J., I likely would have missed it. And I’m really glad I didn’t.

Despite my new found love affair with the word, I know the image of the shrunken woman who sat, perfectly framed behind the glass, aged by her lifestyle, will be the haunting specter in my stable of images – the uncaptured. It’s the image that got away, and there are no words that can recapture the aesthetic of that moment for me.

Gemma-Rose is a photographer and writer currently based in Melbourne. She was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Connections Residency in 2010 and is currently working with non-profit organisation St Kilda Gatehouse teaching, photographing and interviewing street sex workers for her book Red Light | Dark Room (due in April 2011).