Being Alice
“Football is a metaphor for life” - Jean Paul Sartre
During Covid Lockdown everything stopped for teenagers : school, socialising outside of home, extra curricular activities - Life!
Ongoing project 2020-2022 photographing Alice's team and researching how important football is for women today when discussing the relevant themes of equality on and off the pitch, the rights of women, sisterhood and positive self identity.
“If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.” (Berger :1972)
Looking back in disbelief at the injustices that have played out in Parliament in reference to women's rights and freedoms. It is over 100 years ago this December (1921) that the FA refused womens access to FA football pitches. This began immediately after the First World War ended where women who had been liberated during wartime, forming football teams and playing to crowds of up to 53,000, they now found themselves being quietly shunted back into domestic life, returned to their "right and proper place" in society. Football was no longer a health benefit - it was now seen by top physicians, such as Dr Mary Scharlieb of Harley Street, as the "most unsuitable game, too much for a woman's physical frame”.
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.…” (Sontag, S: 1977)
Today there are millions of women and girls playing in teams across the world. These players have found a common mindset of resilience and a healthy sporting lifestyle and for some professional careers through football. It is easy for us to acknowledge history and would hope that it would be impossible to impose these restrictions again, however it is during the present day as I record this project (August 2021) that Western troops completed their occupation in Afghanistan and Afghan women will not be permitted to play sport. The deputy head of the Taliban’s cultural commission, Ahmadullah Wasiq, said women’s sport was considered neither appropriate nor necessary. Reasons he stated : “It is the media era, and there will be photos and videos, and then people watch it. Islam and the Islamic Emirate [Afghanistan] do not allow women to play cricket or play the kind of sports where they get exposed.”
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/08/afghan-women-to-be-banned-from-playing-sport-taliban-say).