The point of this website is to showcase my photography. I never intended it to be a platform for my political beliefs, and I refuse to use it as such. I wouldn’t be so enamored with traveling the world if I wasn’t intrigued and fascinated (and maybe even a little obsessed!) with other cultures. If I’m being totally honest, it has always been the cultures and the places with the greatest degree of divergence from American cultures and customs that attract me the most. And as far as world religion goes, I have no religious affiliation or beliefs whatsoever, so to me they all seem equally crazy and equally fascinating.

However, having said all that, and considering that the majority of what I photograph is other peoples’ cultures, religions, beliefs and traditions, sometimes it becomes impossible not to occasionally weigh in when I find something to be… let’s say... outrageous.

I was well aware, like I’m assuming most people are, that in many other countries, women are denied all sorts of rights, especially in overly religious households. For example, we’ve all heard about women not being technically allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia.

But I think we can agree, it is very difficult to take a photograph of something not happening, or to even become overly incensed by the absence of something, regardless of how heinous it’s denial to women may be. Out of sight, out of mind, you might say. Because when you are in Saudi Arabia, it is not as if you are constantly witnessing women attempting to drive, and then being yanked out of cars and admonished or beaten. I’m sure those battles are being waged elsewhere, perhaps behind closed doors, but they are not taking place in the street. (Not regularly, anyways.)

Likewise, in Egypt, you will see so many women wearing the traditional burqa or niqab, that you become anesthetized to it. For the first several days in Egypt, I couldn’t stop thinking about these women, and fretting about how hot and miserable they must be (it was consistently well over 100° most days, and in Texas we all know how punishing a black outfit can be on a hot summer day), but I quickly learned that many women wear the niqab by choice; so whether or not the niqab was an oppressive garment, that emerged as a much more complicated issue than anything I cared to get involved with.

Plus, once again, we are dealing with another denial, another absence of a thing — the inability of woman to do something, in this case, show her body and/or face— but it is not like we ever witnessed a woman walking down the street in a provocative outfit, as her husband chased after her with gobs of fabric, trying to catch her and cover her up. For better or for worse, the women wearing the burqas and the niqabs just were.

And after much less time than you might think, you simply get used to seeing women dressed that way. In fact, you stop seeing them altogether. When you dress all women the same, taking away any defining characteristics or even the ability to communicate through facial expressions, there is nothing there in my memory to remember. Its not just that they start to blend in to the surroundings, it’s more like these women have been erased. In public, they are both there and yet not there, simultaneously. If the point of this outfit really is to discourage people from looking at your women, then mission accomplished: there is very little left to see.

For arguments sake, you could say that the photo above is of an absence, of a woman not showing her face. Hell! You could even say it’s a photo of a woman not driving. But these arguments are academic, and far from the point I want to make.

In fact, I am going to tell you a different story entirely, and am only using the photo above as a reference point, just to make sure everyone is on the same page when I refer to a niqab. Rather than talk about the absence of something in a photograph, this is going to be a rare reversal. I want to talk about the very real presence of a phenomenon I witnessed, but in the absence of any photograph depicting it.

I am going to talk about niqabs and The Beach.

The woman in the above photo, on the streets of Cairo, was somewhat exceptional, because for some reason, her top layer got to be white, instead of the traditional all black, and we still don't know why. Maybe she was just cold, and that's what was clean and not in the hamper.

I will reluctantly admit that I know the niqab garment best from American female spy dramas. A niqab (or a variation thereof, the burka) is always the outfit they put our main character in when they need to sneak her in (or out) of a Middle Eastern building unnoticed. Incognito. The two defining characteristics of a niqab are that only the lady’s eyes are visible, and that the color is rarely anything other than black. It is therefore essentially a uniform, and the spy genre’s equivalent of how characters in Star Wars are always able to sneak around unnoticed, dressed as storm troopers. I suspect the women in these niqabs are just as hot and uncomfortable as any storm trooper, but that could just be me projecting.

I wear as little as humanly possible, pretty much for the entire duration of our hot Texas summers. We’re talking shorts, tanks, and flip-flops, and so I simply couldn’t imagine the discomfort and anger I would feel if someone forced me instead to wear heavy black material that covered everything from my ankles to the top of my head, including all but a sliver of my face. I am forcing myself to write this portion of my story while sitting outside, on a day that my phone tells me it is 105° here in Dallas, just a few degrees cooler than it was in Egypt. I have sweat dripping off of my face and onto my keyboard presently— and admittedly I am merely wearing summery shorts and a t-shirt, not a thick black smock. This is so I can again put myself back in the proper mindset to describe to you my discovery and what I was feeling at the time, and trust me: I did not have to try very hard to get angry all over again.

Perhaps it is more accurate to call it a realization than it is a discovery, and perhaps many of you will already know the answer to this. But here is my question anyways:

What do you think these Arabic women, the ones who usually don’t get to leave the house unless covered from head to toe in a niqab or burka, get to wear when they go swimming at the beach?

I had never thought about this before, this was never covered in any of my spy dramas. But the answer is, they STILL GET TO WEAR A NIQAB OR A BURKA.

Yes, they are out there in the heat, at the beach, and in the water, fully clothed in reams and reams of heavy, hot, black, fabric. Watching them fully clothed in the water, attempting to swim in fabric that is undoubtedly even heavier now that it is wet, I realized the only time I’ve ever seen a similar visual was in movies.

Specifically, because a character has gone overboard fully clothed, and is now drowning in the ocean. I’m probably thinking of Victorian gowns here, maybe even of Titanic. Or Holly Hunter in The Piano, when she rushes into the sea wearing her voluminous black gown. Victorian dresses are probably the only ensemble I can think of that’s designed even less for swimming than the burka. The cold hard truth is that you can't swim in these things, they were never intended for such a purpose, so all that’s possible is a sort of constricted wading. That’s what all these Egyptian women were doing, just sort of standing and wading and waiting, while their husbands and children swam and had fun. Watching this scene play out, I remember chuckling to myself, thinking the silver lining here is that if one of these asshole husbands were to start drowning, the burka wives would be physically incapable of swimming to save him in these outfits.

All of these fully dressed women looked hot, wet, bedraggled and miserable, and also— I’m just going to say it— ridiculous. Because without fail, who is standing next to them to put it all in perspective? Their husbands, in a Speedo. Every time.

This was no longer the absence of a right, to me, this was now the visual manifestation of oppression. Say what you will about skimpy Speedos, they are still an activity-appropriate and weather-appropriate piece of clothing. So why does he get to frolic at the beach, all but naked, and have a grand old time, while his wife looks to be the absolute embodiment of humiliation, discomfort, and misery?

It was disgusting.

Through that small slit, all I could see were these women’s eyes— and the now watery, drippy-black mascara surrounding them — but that was enough. I didn’t need to see much more to guess that every second of every minute of every hour that these women spent out there in the water, they were secretly planning their husband’s deaths.

I know I would be.

How could you do that to another human being? Or to get even more nuanced, how could you possibly have anything resembling a good time, knowing that just a few feet away from you, your spouse and the mother of your children, was having the most miserable time of her life? I suppose if you viewed that person more as a servant or as a possession rather than as a partner, the truth is, you simply might not care.

I was at a hotel in Egypt, riding the elevator back to my room one day, and it first stopped at the recreation level, and opened to reveal a family that was clearly coming from the pool. It was a man and their three children. The children, regardless of gender, were all wearing bathing suits. The wife, however, was dressed from head to toe in a sopping wet niqab, and she was struggling to reach the elevator in time before the doors closed. She had the youngest child balanced in one arm and was carrying a beach bag with all the afternoon’s necessities spilling out of it in the other. When a bottle or something fell out and started rolling across the floor, I moved to help her but one of her other kids picked it up first.

Her husband, meanwhile, had just pranced directly into the elevator. He didn’t even look up from his phone when the doors had started to close and leave his wife behind. He had on nothing but a Speedo, and was carrying nothing aside from his phone. He never looked up from it the entire time we rode the elevator in silence.

The elevator seemed to take forever, and I just kept my eyes transfixed on the enormous puddle of water that was pooling up on the floor of the elevator, all around this woman, as the water from her drenched niqab gushed out in rivulets. Everyone else was dressed appropriately for their day at the pool, and seemed to be in good spirits. She looked exhausted, wet, and miserable.

I looked up and met her eyes briefly. Maybe this is me projecting again, or maybe it was the smeary mascara I could see dripping all around her eyes, but she looked to me like she was crying.

I know I would be.

Before I started writing this, I obviously gave all of this a great deal of thought, and one of the things I asked myself was this: If I were given a choice, and the choice was that I would be allowed to:

A). leave the house and go to the beach, but I would have to cover all but a few inches of my body with stifling hot tarp that was completely incompatible with swimming and potentially even life threatening due to heat exhaustion or even drowning,

or

B). I could stay home and do nothing, while everyone else in my family went to the beach without me.

Which one would I choose?

I still don’t know the answer to that question, not with any certainty, at least. And I doubt this woman in the elevator was even given a choice, because if she stayed behind, who would carry the beach bags and wrangle the kids while this man swam and played on his phone?

I will say that for once— seeing this fully-dressed, sopping wet, weighted down woman, dripping water all over the elevator floor, standing next to this carefree man in his Speedo, pecking away at his phone— she was anything but invisible. Not only did I notice her, but I wanted to somehow help her. And she might not have even wanted my help, or felt she needed any help at all. But I noticed her, I saw her, and I have thought about her ever since.

So in this instance, if the point of the niqab was to discourage me from looking at her, to discourage me or any man from noticing any of these wet, black-clad, women at the beach, and to make them invisible… then in this instance, it achieved anything but.

For many reasons, I have no photographs of any of this; and yet, these women are now more visible to me than ever before.