Ameena Rojee - Women in Photography

Ameena Rojee in Iceland

Ameena Rojee is from South London and has a Spanish and Mauritian heritage. Ameena runs ‘of the land and us’ giving photographers – new and established - a platform through which to express their hopes and concerns. She is a former Senior Campaigns Producer for British Journal of Photography, a role which gave her an amazing insight into the industry.

More recently she has been able to focus on her own projects and is currently walking 1000 kilometres in Southern Spain through La Via de la Plata and documenting her fascinating journey on Instagram.

Ameena has travelled widely and is infinitely curious about people and places – a quality much needed in photographers but not always found.

Ameena is enormously insightful about being part of different cultures and as a Londoner of mixed heritage she is invested in creating her own identity and this is a big part she has the tenacity to go on these pilgrimages following the long tradition of photographers before her such as Josef Koudelka and Jonas Bendiksen.

Can you tell me a bit about how you came to work for BJP in your past role there?

The stars aligned! I was planning to go travelling long-term when I got a call from an old boss who wanted to meet. He let me know that he'd been hired by British Journal of Photography, tasked to build a new commercial team and department from scratch, and asked me if I was interested in taking on a new role. Because we’d worked together very well previously and he knew I’d had some experience in what he was planning to do, he’d thought of me.

In all honesty, I wasn’t sure at first. I’d just left my job to take time out to focus on my own photography career as it had completely fallen by the wayside, and I was considering doing a Masters that same year. However, I was able to negotiate more flexibility because of this and was able to make sure that I would still have time to focus on my personal work. Also, I knew that when the time was right that I would want to try freelancing full-time as a photographer - and where better to gain experience, build on knowledge and make contacts than British Journal of Photography? It was clearly an amazing opportunity so I went for it.

In your bio you say your mixed Spanish/Mauritian heritage influences your photography practice - how & in what ways?

Portrait of Hanna by Ameena Rojee

My mum is from Galicia in northern Spain, and my dad from Mauritius, a small island country in the Indian Ocean, itself with a very mixed heritage and history. They both grew up in poor families, leaving their respective countries at very young ages and heading for England to find better opportunities. I was born and bred in south London.

Travelling back home to visit family was a regular activity, so from a very young age and throughout my childhood I was taken around the world. Every school holiday long enough to go away, I was taken to visit family in Spain, Mauritius, France, Cuba... I have had the opportunity to visit and see so many incredible different places, people, religions and cultures.

Because I spent so much of my childhood in these incredible places and living with people so different to myself, it triggered an interest in people and cultures which has only grown with time. Now, these two subjects form the majority of my practice and the work I make.

What I have always loved is that I have the privilege of belonging to every one of those cultures in spite of the sometimes huge differences between them: the religions - Catholicism and Islam - beliefs, daily routines, outlooks on life, the land and environment itself...

I came across a term last year, “third culture kid”, meaning someone with heritage of two different cultures. My experience of each culture feels diluted, because I wasn’t born into it - I didn’t get to fully experience the traditions, rituals, relationships that you can only gain from growing up in a particular place. I identify most with my English and specifically south London self; but even then I sometimes feel the sensation of not fully belonging because I don’t “look English”. I know for a fact that I am a Londoner through and through and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise, but sometimes the feeling doesn’t care what I think I know and it seeps through anyway.

It’s this feeling of not belonging to any one culture which has pushed me to, in a sense, start creating my own culture, to build my own traditions and a certain way of doing things - even within my own family. My personal work is heavily focused on things that I am interested in doing myself, and those things come from wanting to build a culture that I am fluent in, something that I feel I belong to completely.

How did 'of the land & us' come about and what opportunities are you going to offer through this medium?

'The End of Class' from 'Hard Work' by Ameena Rojee

It was something I worked on in university. In my final year, instead of a dissertation, we were given the option of creating a business plan. I had always enjoyed writing - for a couple of years beforehand I used to interview photographers and write and edit for a photography blog - and that’s how I got the idea and motivation for of the land & us.

I built it to be a platform for supporting photographers, by sharing work and inviting insight, critique (constructive, of course) and consideration on a variety of topics. At the moment, I do this through interviews and simple features through the online website and our social media channels, including Instagram where I try to do takeovers a little differently (we set themes for the artists taking over, and sometimes invite artists to “battle” - more a friendly collaboration really), again to provoke new ideas and inspiration.

In terms of the future, I have always wanted to bring the platform into the physical world as print. I have spent the time since it first launched mulling it over, considering how I can make it different, as there are already so many brilliant and unique indie publications out there. I have some interesting plans now, and aim to be able to do this over the next year or so. And the hope is that, one day, we’ll be able to invite artists to be involved in opportunities of our own making, whether that be bursaries, residencies and the like!

You give talks and engage new photographers - how can we make the industry more supportive and inclusive of people from many different backgrounds?

Shimen Mountain by Ameena Rojee

Yes - although I still feel it’s bit crazy that I have been invited to do so. I always think, “who the hell wants to listen to what I say?!”

I recently spoke at the Photography Show 2019 in Birmingham with the brilliant RAN Studio about this topic; though this event was aimed at women in photography, what we spoke about can be applied all around. The issues in the industry are a vicious, unending circle feeding on itself. It’s a horrendous jumble that will take much, much more time and effort from all of us to untangle, so I don’t dare claim that what I suggest can make a huge difference; but, I think they can help if even just a tiny bit.

From the point of view of the photographer, a lot of it is about confidence and knowing (and accepting!) your place in the industry. By that, I mean accepting that you are good at what you do, if not great, and that you do have the knowledge, skill and experience to be able to demand respect - respectful opportunity, and, importantly, respectful pay.

“Imposter Syndrome” is a term I’ve seen a lot recently. The struggle is very real. An example I will mention is the difference between what men charge and what women charge; I’ve come across this several times now - through articles, social media and anecdotes - that reveal how men often tend to charge more, sometimes a lot more, than women. It completely makes sense to me that this happens, but at the time it blew my mind and made me really look at how hesitant, how safe and how placating I am when I send over my fees to a client.

Upon realising that, I told myself to have more confidence, even if I had to fake it, and perhaps even be a bit more arrogant when it came to charging. There’s not much solid data on this, so I’m currently trying to collect data through this anonymous survey - I am keen for data from all sorts of professional photographers, so please do fill it in if interested.

On the other hand, from the point of view of the gatekeepers in photography (if you run an opportunity, however big or small, you are a gatekeeper in the industry), a little effort goes a long way.

One example: more and more, artists have been calling out opportunities - competitions, grants, panel talks and bigger events - for lacking in a diverse representation and generally presenting one skewed point of view, often that of white men. But then, what we so often hear back is the excuse that “not enough of this group entered this opportunity”. It’s true that in a lot of cases, there just aren’t enough photographers from underrepresented groups submitting work - something I saw time and time again through the competitions and open calls we ran at BJP. While part of the issue comes back to confidence on the photographer’s part (unsure if they’re good enough to enter in the first place), there is also a real issue with lack of effort on the part of the gatekeeper.

What effort are you, as a gatekeeper, making to push the opportunity you are offering past the usual suspects? These days, it’s not difficult. As a result of the convenience of the internet and social media, there are a great number of official groups out there now offering easily accessible databases for various minority groups. Just to name a few, there is Women Photograph, Native Agency and Diversify. There are many more. It is so easy to send a simple message, asking “Please can you reshare this among your audience, we need more of this particular underrepresented group to apply.” The excuses for underrepresentation are disintegrating, and it seems that it only persists due to a lack of motivation to change the way things have been done.

Can you tell me a bit more about El Camino and what you found out about yourself as a person and your photographic practice during that long pilgrimage?

From El Camino by Ameena Rojee

The Camino de Santiago is a well-known ancient pilgrimage that leads to the city of Santiago de Compostela in North-West Spain. It is believed that this is where the body of the martyred apostle St. James resides, after being carried from Jerusalem through to his final resting place in Santiago de Compostela.

There are many official routes including a few which start outside of Spain, including one in England (the Camino Inglés) and one that goes all the way to Jerusalem.

Initially, I was motivated to walk the pilgrimage by the physical, mental and creative challenge. I had just left my first job post-graduation, and I spent those two years away from my photography not making any new work. The camino sounded like the ideal place and opportunity to do something new and see where I was at, creatively speaking.

At the same time, I was also interested as a way to explore my roots; my mother is from Galicia, the region in which the pilgrimage ends. Despite visiting often, I had never fully experienced the culture, as one is able to do when travelling alone, and so the camino seemed a great way to understand this place which makes up half of my heritage.

It was a wonderfully unique experience, made up of many positive and negative times; the walk became a simplistic routine of walk, eat, sleep, mostly spent in varying levels of pain and tiredness. The repetition of walking long distances each day through the incredible changeable landscape conjured a different time and world. It was relief and disbelief at the end of each day when I would look back on how far I had come, all distance covered on my own two feet, every single thing I needed carried on my own back, held up and moving on my own strength. I discovered how far I could go; physically, mentally - and how far I could go past the limits I thought I had. I have written an essay along with the series that you can view here.

The series of photographs I made on the pilgrimage became an unexpected challenge - my tastes had changed and the way I thought I liked to work had changed, influenced by the constant influx of photography and images and styles I looked at daily for two years, in the job I had just left. On the walk, I learnt more about what it was that really interests me, and also the way I photographed was developing and becoming more true to me. I began to understand where those interests came from, often thinking on my heritage and history on the way while immersed in Spanish culture.

That was almost three years ago, and I’m just now preparing to head off on my second Camino de Santiago pilgrimage next week! This time, I’m going alone - as a naturally solitary person, I’m excited for the chance to explore being in solitude and away from the noise. I have chosen a different route, beginning in the southern city of Sevilla, called the ‘Via de la Plata’ - the “Silver Way”. At about 1000 km, it’s one of the longest routes and it will take me around seven weeks of walking to arrive.

Once again, the reasons I have chosen to walk the pilgrimage are varied. Last year I felt that it was the right time to try freelancing full-time, and in September I left my position at BJP. My desire to do another long walk has been building for some time. It’s partly a break, something physically challenging that I hope will refresh and revitalise body and mind.

I also intend to work on a new project; not so much of a continuation of El Camino but a spin-off. Less focused on the pilgrimage itself, and more about the desire to walk/to wander, to lose oneself in walking and in nature (inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’).

Something I came across in my research into this particular route which particularly struck me was a description of the long trek, analogised as the journey from life to death; at the beginning, you are like a newborn finding your feet and almost literally learning to walk. You near half-way as an adolescent, understanding yourself and your surroundings more now, yet still so curious and wide-eyed. You suddenly reach a point of confidence and a strong sense of self; adulthood. Then, sadness and a sense of relief as the end nears. And, once the end has come and gone, a feeling of rebirth.