Moving from the macro topic of gender equality to more of Phil’s individual approach in his work, we offer the rest of the interview. (Questions in italics.)
As a photographer you’ve had to learn the art of approaching individuals not only for a photograph but also for interviews. How do you approach women and girls as subjects, especially they are victims of gender-based violence?
I approach them as I approach anybody: out of curiosity and respect. I’m approaching them mostly to tell a story. Just like you right now, you’re approaching me and you have an agenda to tell a story. That’s the way I approach the women that I bring into my photographs and films.
Phil Photographing an Acid Burn Survivor in Cambodia (Filming for UN Women, Photo Danielle Prince)
Have you had to navigate that potentially awkward space of being a man and approaching a woman? How do you do that?
I don’t think of it that way. I’m reminded of it at times, especially in places like Afghanistan. I’m very touchy. “Hi, how are you doing?” [Mimics clapping someone on the shoulder.] I was reminded there: you do not do that. I don’t really differentiate in my mind between women and men in terms of the work I do. I’m just not thinking ‘I’m a man, she’s a woman’. I do hear about it though. I get surprised at times when I hear that there was grumbling in CARE because I’m was a man out there doing this and why didn’t they have a woman doing it?
So coming from a macro-picture in talking about gender equality, what motivates you to tell individual women’s stories?
It is the most effective way for an audience to access a situation or an issue. It is just the way the human mind is built. We can’t really wrap our heads around 200 million deaths; we can wrap our heads around somebody we know who dies, or is starving, or is oppressed. Nicholas Kristof talks about this. He was doing a story on the issue of female infanticide in Asia because of dowry. There are millions of missing girls in the world because of this [type of] gender discrimination. But it was a non-issue. But then you have the death of Princess Diana and the whole world is weeping. At the same time how many people are dying in wars and [because of] violence against women? It’s just the way we are built: individual stories move us.
Having heard hundreds if not thousands of stories, is there any one that sticks out, or that touched you most deeply?
I’m moved by stories that have to do with the ‘wounded healer’; the person who has been a victim of the issue and who springs back from the tragedy and uses it to propel them to address it for others. One of my favorite stories is the one of Abay, the woman in Ethiopia. It is the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell talks about. They go out into the unknown world and come back with information for the tribe. That type of story is always amazing to me. They are powerful stories when they use tragedy to better humankind.
Abay’s story:
I’m getting to the stage where people come up to me and say ‘hey, you inspired me to do this’. It is people I don’t even know. It is very rewarding when you hear that. I say, ‘what did I do, quit orthodontics? (laughs). Or ‘the story on what you’re doing for women, or what you’re did for Tibet, or the way you’re going about it’.
You’re causing a ripple effect.
Yeah. It has nothing to do with the story that I’m doing. They are doing something else completely but they’re doing something that has a lot of meaning to them, and it is usually something socially and environmentally good for the world.
How Will her World be Different from her Grandmother’s? (Photo Danielle Prince)
Do you have any concluding thoughts for readers?
Here I am almost 70 years old and I can look back in my lifetime see such a huge improvement in the way women are treated. There is a long way to go, but in terms of giving women equal opportunity in doing what they want to do, different opportunities to do what they want to do, we’ve achieved much. The most dramatic example for me was in my dental school where there wasn’t a woman in my class, not one. In the whole UC San Francisco Dental School there was one woman and it was the daughter of a visiting professor. I went back to give a commencement address at this same school and 54% of the student body were women. In 30 years it had changed that much. Everybody thinks the world is getting worse, that there are all these horrible problems and yeah, we’ve always had problems. Just pick up an old paper on WWII and read the headlines: 200,000 people killed in a day in 1 battle. I don’t know how many people died in Iraq, but on our side it was less than 10,000. In WWII that would be a couple of hours in battle.
Everything is getting better. The thing that makes everything seem like it’s getting worse is media. (laughs) The media has to find news and it’s everywhere. It’s big business and unfortunately people crave bad news. But I personally think things are getting a lot better.