LONDON (AlertNet) - Documentary photographer Jenny Matthews has been taking pictures of women in conflict zones since the 1980s and a book of her photos was launched last week in London, with an exhibition of some of the images.
She captures women's experiences of war as mothers, wives, fighters, survivors and witnesses, or just getting on with their daily lives in exceptional circumstances.
The book's epigraph is a quotation from South African feminist author Olive Schreiner: "There is perhaps no woman...who could look down upon a battlefield covered with slain but the thought would rise in her, 'So many mothers' sons! So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within; so many hours of anguish and struggle so that breath might be!' No woman who is a woman says of a human body, 'It is nothing!'"
Matthews first travelled as a photographer to Central America to document the lives of Nicaraguan Sandinista women for the British agency Christian Aid.
"I have been doing variations on that commission ever since," she says in the book.
The exhibition and book -- both entitled "Women and War" -- are co-sponsored by ActionAid.
Matthews spent much of the 1980s documenting turbulent times in Central America: human rights activists in El Salvador, indigenous peoples in Guatemala and revolutionary Nicaragua.
In the 1990s she worked in the Middle East and Africa and since 2000 she has visited Chechnya, Gaza and the West Bank, Nepal and Afghanistan.
The photographs show the lives of displaced people, such as Palestinians on the edge of the Mediterranean, women fighters in Eritrea and widows in El Salvador holding photographs of their loved ones.
The pictures are accompanied by extracts from her diary.
In 2000, she met women rebuilding a station that has no trains in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in the midst of rubble and desolation. "Ask why they are doing it," she writes. "They reply, so that the city will exist again."
Many of Matthews' photos show women rebuilding their lives after terrible violence. In Sierra Leone, she photographed single mothers learning to weave braided hairstyles to earn a living.
She writes: "Most have lost husbands, many were abducted and returned form the bush pregnant. Need to make sure children grow up loved and cared for -- so they don't become the violent child soldiers of the future. "
Matthews has visited Afghanistan four times -- first in 1988 during the Russian occupation, when women worked in factories, went to university and had to take part in village militias, then in 1996 in pre-Taliban Kabul.
By the time she went back in 1998, the Taliban had clamped down even on singing.
In late 2001, Matthews returned to Kabul and had an emotional reunion with Razia, a widow she had photographed in 1999. In the earlier picture, the woman is shrouded in black, holding her wedding photo, which shows the husband who had disappeared four years earlier, and she looks far older than her 32 years.
In December 2001, Matthews photographed the same woman putting on lipstick for the first time in 10 years.
ActionAid picture editor Laurence Watts said in a statement: "ActionAid uses her photos almost every day because they show humanity and hope amidst poverty, injustice and violence."
London-based Matthews has also worked for Africa Rights, Care International, Oxfam, SightSavers and the Salvation Army.
In 1998, she received the One World Media Award for Photographer of the Year.
"Women and War" is published by Pluto Press in association with ActionAid.
To see a gallery of Jenny Matthews' photos on the Internet visit the ActionAid website www.actionaid.org
The "Women and War" exhibition is at the.gallery@OXO, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, London SE1 until May 11.
