2022 Portrait Series

What is a sexual assault and what are its consequences?

STORY INTRO:
What is a sexual assault and what are its consequences?
We focus on this question by letting several women tell their stories about being raped and sexually assaulted. Regardless of the character of the assault, the women are left with similar emotions. Emotions they can???t shake off easily. Emotions they must live with, and which may take years to process. We returned to the locations where the assaults took place, and collaboratively produced photos that tell stories about the consequences of sexual assault. The women react to and describe the photos in their own words. Their names have been altered to protect their anonymity._____

CAPTION_____
Line is raped on a Tinder date in her home. She objects repeatedly, but the man doesn???t respect her refusal. Eventually she seizes up and lets it happen. _____
???The trauma I???ve been subjected to will be part of me forever. I may have been through therapy and been outspoken about it, but as a human being I???m defined by my past. The photo really expresses who I was, and who I can???t let go of. Weakness, loneliness, shame, emptiness and the sense of feeling destroyed. I???m proud of myself, even though many of these emotions around the rape still haunt me. The photo shows it all.???_____


MY INSPIRATION_____
I was inspired to do this project when I was assigned to photograph a woman who had been raped on a Tinder date. She was to appear anonymously.
My intention was to photograph her empty bed, where the assault had occurred, and then do a blurred portrait. But she soon revealed that she, too, likes to photograph, and that she???d been thinking it would make a strong statement if she lay naked on the bed. I would never have dared to ask about such an option, but I sensed that she was a strong and creative person who knew the photographic language and its potential. We agreed that we would try to create an image that was at once beautiful and brutal. A picture that you couldn???t turn your back on. We did not intend to create a precise reproduction of what the scene looked like after the rape, but rather attempted to catch a sense of the emotional ramifications of the rape.
When she saw the photos, she exclaimed: ???This is exactly the way I want to show it.??? All this made a deep impression on me. Not only the collaboration and the trust she had in me, but also the subsequent reaction. It made me believe that it could make sense explore this further and expand the scope to include other types of sexual assault. I was able to do this in collaboration with the female journalist who wrote the Tinder article and with ten of the many strong and brave women, who showed an interest in the project.

Ida is held captive for hours on end in an apartment in her own housing complex in the city of Skanderborg. She tries to escape several times. When night falls, the perpetrator rapes her in the building’s basement. She yells and cries, but no one comes to the rescue.
“I recognize the feeling of being lost, of having given up, and above all of being utterly exhausted. It was actually a relief to return and to demystify the scene. I picked up a part of myself that I had left behind 14 years ago.

In Klara???s childhood home, her mother throws a party for her colleagues. A male guest, with whom Klara has previously had a relationship, enters the guest room where she lies asleep. She wakes up to find that he is raping her.
???When I look at the picture, I???m struck with grief and a sense of abandonment, feelings I???ve been struggling with since it happened. It???s easier for me to be angry, and then the photo turns into a tough mirror image that is also full of release. When I look at the picture, my brain tells me: ???This is not me. This did not happen to me??? ??? and at the same time my entire body is totally aware of what happened.

On a fall evening, Maja is on her way home from work, when a man pulls her into a thicket across from an apartment building. Holding a knife to her throat, he rapes her repeatedly for an hour and a half. He knows where she lives, he says, and threatens to kill her if she ever tells anyone about it.
???When I look at the photo of myself, I???m hit by a feeling that defies description. The photo shows the toughest experience I???ve had, and will have, in my life. It says more than a thousand words. I feel angry and shameful, but at the same time I???m glad to see how far I???ve come since then. It gives me the strength to keep on fighting.???

At a party in a community center in northern Zealand, Mia accompanies a guy into the lavatory because he???s feeling ill and needs help. She can???t remember all of it, but he locks the stall, kisses her, gropes her, and leaves semen on her skirt before he returns to the party.
???I felt like I was just a body and not a person. An object that exists only to satisfy another person???s instinctive needs and is discarded like a piece of trash. As I look at the photo, I feel brave and proud. It reflects a part of my life that I have been really ashamed of, but I refuse to live my life in shame or as a victim.???

Liv is 15 when she and a friend meet up with two men that the friend met earlier that summer. Liv eventually finds herself in a car parked in a wooded area – alone with one of the men. Liv rebuffs him several times – she does not want this. He ignores her signals and rapes her.
“I’m touched when I see the photo. I think back to that younger version of myself, how I felt awkward and alone in the world. I was powerless. It was like a prison. I’m thinking in parallels, big and small. I’m big in the in the photo because I’ve conquered fear and I’m processing the experience. At the time, I felt very small, weak and inconsequential.”

Following a match on Tinder and months of messages back and forth, Sofie and a man decide to meet for a stroll. It starts to rain, and they go to her place. When Sofie wants to end the date, the man refuses to leave. He ends up raping her on her bed.
“You feel so exposed, so defenseless, so small and insignificant. For me it makes a lot of sense to exhibit the vulnerability and fragility inherent in my story. This is my way of taking back control. I had no control that day. He decided that it had to happened. Now I reclaim my body.”

Mette has been separated from her friends at the Roskilde music festival. While searching for them in the camping area, she runs into five guys. The encounter ends with Mette being gang raped. She tells no one about it. She keeps it to herself. Soon 30 years have passed.
“The photo illustrates the feeling of total isolation and loneliness the rape left behind in me. To be cut off from the world, wanting to hide without being able to. The feeling of being utterly exposed without the possibility of retreating or finding safety.”

After a night on the town, Lea wakes up in her apartment with an unpleasant feeling and can’t remember how she got home. As she gets up, semen starts running down her leg. She’s convinced that someone has spiked her drink.
“The photo captures the loneliness that has been so prominent for me since that night. I felt abandoned as despair and confusion dominated my emotional life. I was afraid to ask for help and let much of my life come to a standstill for a long time. I’ve since learned to talk about it, to find words for the thoughts and feelings that still affect me.”

Naja and some of her friends have gone to a pop-up summer camp in the north of Jutland. They’re there to celebrate the start of vacation and to party hard. On the last night she gets really drunk and wakes up to find that some guy is inside her.
“I’m very touched when I see the photo. It sends a forceful signal about how I felt after the assault, and I have this urge to help the woman in the picture to cope with this situation differently than she did at the time. I recognize the feeling of being alone and feeling shame alone. And wanting to put this away and wrap it up as if it had never happened.”

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Verlin Frazier, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in front of a patient board in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Frazier still remembers watching a woman walk between RotoProne beds to reach — and say goodbye to — her husband. “I remember biting my tongue and cheek, holding my breath, anything to prevent myself from bursting into tears,” says Verlin.

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Christina Anderson, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. During brutal days at the hospital, Christina Anderson and other nurses would scream or cry together, knowing that at home it would be hard for their families to understand what they were going through. Anderson's 12-year-old would ask: "Mommy, how many lives did you save today?” Or: “Mommy, how many people died today?”

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Lisa Lampkin, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. “I would go home, try to sleep," she says. Then she would “wake up to the reality of this pandemic again.”

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Elisa Castorena, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Castorena remembers many patients who died, she prefers to focus on happy memories such as working with other nurses to bathe bed-ridden patients while listening to music and joking with them.

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Debbie Wooters, one of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit since March 2020, holds a group picture taken with her fellow nurses in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Learning they would be put on ventilators frightened many patients. Wooters remembers a patient who “looked at me and said, through his gasping breath, ‘I don’t want to die.'”

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Jamie Corcoran, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. As an ICU nurse the last five years, Corcoran got used to seeing death. She dealt with it by remaining detached. With COVID-19, detachment wasn’t possible.

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Cathy Cullen, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Cullen sometimes tears up when thinking about what she and the other nurses endured. “The birth of my children and marriage aside, being a part of this team, this endeavor, and this pandemic is by far the greatest, worst, most rewarding, most painful thing I have ever done in my life,” she says.

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Anthony Wilkinson, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Wilkinson still thinks about those 30 hours — the ones when three patients died. “You try to keep somebody alive, but their body is decomposing,” says Wilkinson.

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Jill Shwam, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, stands for a photo in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. There is a scene that replays in Jill Shwam’s head each day: an 11-year-old boy screaming while his mother, in her early 40s, doesn’t respond as doctors try to save her. “You need to say goodbye,” Shwam remembers saying as the woman’s oxygen levels dropped sharply. The woman told her son: “I hope this isn’t the last time I talk to you. I have to go."

In this photo created with an in-camera multiple exposure, registered nurse Nikko Grecco, part of the first group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for photos in the closed COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., Tuesday, April 6, 2021. Grecco vividly remembers the first death in the COVID ward and how he died. “I have never felt so defeated as I did in that moment,” Grecco says.

The current socio-political environment in the United States has led many African Americans to arm themselves. In fact African Americans has the highest increase in new gun owners of any demographic, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The goal is not to glorify gun ownership but to show the hypocrisy within it and dismantle negative stereotypes associated with African American gun ownership.

Damillah Lane, 26, embrace her daughter Skylar Lane, 8, as she holds her firearm outside of their home on Saturday, April 10, 2021 in Killeen, Tx. “Whenever my husband leaves I feel a need to protect my family,” Damillah said.

Jamyce Brown, 29, right, embraces her husband Keon Brown, 27, outside of their home on Sunday, April 18, 2021 in Killeen, Tx. “In my hometown introducing a child to a gun may be potentially setting them up for failure,” Chicago native Jamyce said.

Marvin West, 39, holds his dog outside his home on Monday, April 06, 2021 in Killeen, Tx. “It’s more to the picture than what you see,” West said. People often judge West based on his appearance. He mentions that those people would be surprised to know that he’s a business owner that holds a Masters degree.

Justin Barlow, 34, left, gazes at wife Cha’von Barlow, 33, outside of their home on Saturday, June 18, 2021 in Round Rock, Tx. “I never want my family to feel powerless,” Justin said. Justin was introduced to guns at the age of 14 through hunting. Later he introduced his wife to guns. “In my absence my wife and children will be safe,” he said.

Brandon Antone, 37, stands outside of his apartment holding his firearm on Wednesday, May 26, 2021 in Austin, Tx. “I noticed when I go to the range it wasn’t a lot of us there so I wanted to create a place we could talk about guns,” he said. Antone started a Facebook group with nearly 2,000 African American members in the Austin, Tx area with the goal of creating a safe space for them to talk about firearms.

Brothers Dorian Black, 20, from left, and Ashton Black, 13, postures their firearm as Datrelle Black, 46, is embraced by his wife Rohonda Black, 44, outside of their home on Sunday, April 18, 2021 in Killeen, Tx. “For my children I take the curiosity out of it, total avoidance of guns teaches fear we should inform our children of gun safety,” Datrelle said.

Kenneth Frazier, 35, left, and Tylissa Frazier, 38, are seen outside of their home holding their firearms on Saturday, April 03, 2021 in Temple, Tx. "We get pulled over a lot so having a license will show that we are law abiding citizens," Mrs Frazier said.

The current socio-political environment in the United States has led many African Americans to arm themselves. In fact African Americans has the highest increase in new gun owners of any demographic, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

Asia Wragg, 35, holds her firearm outside of her home on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 in Fort Hood, Tx. “As a single woman with children my priority is to protect and defend my family,” Wragg said.

The current socio-political environment in the United States has led many African Americans to arm themselves. In fact African Americans has the highest increase in new gun owners of any demographic, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

David Butler, 55, grasps his hunting rifle near his home on July 24, 2021 in Manor, Tx. “I believe a lot of people would love to hunt if they had the opportunity,” he said. Leasing of hunting land serves as a financial barrier for many African Americans. “A year lease can be upwards of $1100 and you may only walk away with one deer that year,” Butler said.

Trina’ Duncan, 39, foreground, postures her pistol outside a local gun range after training with her pastor Andrew Long, 46, on Saturday, May 16, 2021 in Killeen, Tx. “I have been in moments that would not have occurred if I was a guy,” Duncan said. According to the Pew Research Center, Women are less likely to own a firearm compared to Men.

Lindberg Wilborn, 32, holds the target he used to qualify for his license to carry permit outside a local gun range on Saturday, March 27, 2021 in Killeen, TX. “Society looks at black men as predators and scary people so most of us are scared to own a firearm in fear of fueling the fear that already exists,” Wilborn said. Wilborn recently graduated from the police academy. It is his goal to become the change he wants to see in this country.

Aaron Banks, 38, and his son Aaron Banks Jr., 08, embrace at a local park on Saturday, May 22, 2021 in Cedar Park, Tx. “The image of the average gun enthusiast needs an update,” Mr Banks said. Aaron Sr. is one of 24 Pistol Instructors certified by the National African American Gun Association. He is the President of Keep Firing LLC where he has made his son the CEO.

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 27, 2021: Lida, whose name has been changed for her safety, was a police woman when the Taliban captured in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Sept. 27, 2021. Her mother burned all her documents, and she removed her uniform and burned it the day of the fall of Kabul. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 15, 2021: Farah, first name only for her safety, is a doctoral student and a prominent activist for women’s rights, and is now moving from location to location for her safety as she continues to attend protests for women’s rights in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 23, 2021: Mahbouba Seraj, an outspoken journalist and women’s rights activist, remained after the Taliban took over the country instead of evacuating, to start on her work to hold the Taliban accountable on their promise to uphold women’s rights that were hard-fought for in the past 20 years, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Sept. 23, 2021. Seraj is also the founder of the nonprofit Afghan Women’s Network. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 18, 2021: Nahid, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, is a journalist from on of the rural provinces and is now living in hiding with her family as she awaits evacuations from Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 18, 2021. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 25, 2021: 21 year old Sakina, who asked that only her first name be published for her safety, had $12 and a dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur, and eventually ran a successful workshare and study space, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Sept. 25, 2021. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 14, 2021: Waheza used to work in the parliament of the previous government and is now an activist living in hiding in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021. Waheza was active in the protests for women’s rights and was beaten during the protest by the Taliban. Her mother remembers the last Taliban rule. She recently discovered that her next door neighbors are Taliban supporters and would host Taliban fighters for dinners. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 26, 2021: Fatima Roshanian is currently living in hiding, from the Taliban, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, Sept. 26, 2021. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 16, 2021: Lamar, 18, who goes by her first name, aspires to be work in politics like her father who used to work for the previous government, as she hides out in her home in Kabul, Afghanistan, Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021. Lamar os waiting to leave the country, but is not waiting to resume her education. She’s taking online classes in the meantime to keep her education on track until her family can evacuate from the country. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 21, 2021: Sahar, who goes by name for her security, manages a large company in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021. She grew up as a refugee as recalls her life under the last Taliban rule before the Americans toppled their regime. She now works in a back office of her company after she relinquished her office space to male coworker to give the illusion of a man being in charge of the company in case the Taliban visits their offices. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

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KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- SEPTEMBER 14, 2021: Laila Haideri, 42, the owner of Taj Begum – a cafe in the Puli Surkh neighborhood that was popular with young Afghan men and women dared to mingle together in public and express themselves through music, dance and conversations – hides out in an undisclosed location as she awaits evacuation from Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)