Interview with Maya Goded
- Interview with Maya Goded
Maya Goded is a documentary photographer and filmmaker born in Mexico City in 1967. Her documentary work is focused on people and communities with little or no visual presence, most often representing the lives of marginalised women. In compelling and intimate documentary images and films, Goded deals with issues such as prostitution/sex-work, feminicide, race, and traditional healing. She has received numerous international awards for her photographic work, including the Guggenheim fellowship, the W. Eugene Smith Award and the Mexican National Council for Culture and the Arts award (mayagoded.net). In May 2017, her feature-length documentary Plaza de la soledad was released in movie theatres across Mexico and earned praise at the Sundance film festival (Smith 2017). I interviewed Maya Goded in Mexico City in 2013, when she was finishing filming the documentary and I was finishing my PhD thesis on her work, parts of which will be published this year in a monograph entitled Photographing the Unseen Mexico: Maya Goded’s Socially Engaged Documentaries (forthcoming, Legenda). In wide-ranging conversations spanning nearly a week, Goded was very generous in sharing her thoughts on the physical, emotional and symbolic violence suffered by the people in front of her camera.
You have an enviable ease in approaching people living in precarious situations, and convincing them to open up their lives. How do you achieve that closeness?
I think my interest in telling stories through images is rooted in my childhood. My father was involved in clandestine political activity, which was discussed a lot at home. However, I could not speak about this at school so from an early age I was conscious of living in two parallel realities—one at home and another one outside of it. My background is a little unusual in Mexico, because my mother came from the US—I had a sense she came from another world. From childhood, I had this awareness of different realities and different lives being lived all around me, which fascinated me. I still want to be part of different worlds and learn about how others live their lives, learn about other people’s reality. I also love being an intermediary in bringing people together and seeing what happens. This is what I try to do in my visual work.
What ethical issues do you encounter in your work? [End Page 104]
I think that with the kind of work I do, the question of ethics is one that crops up every day. It is not just about whether I have the right to photograph the people I want to photograph. Documentary practice is full of everyday ethical dilemmas, which require attention and thoughtfulness. I still struggle with photographing people in desperate situations, who are perhaps looking for a way out of their despair. I had to acknowledge a long time ago that I could not save anybody, but that being there to listen to their story and show it to others is of value in and of itself. In the kind of work I do with marginalised and invisible communities, ethical decisions cannot always be taken in advance. They have to be lived, negotiated and collaboratively explored between the two sides of the documentary encounter.
Has your methodology changed throughout your career?
My way of approaching people has evolved. I find that I now build rapports much more quickly. The biggest learning curve was my work on Tierra negra, because traveling as a lone woman on the Costa Chica was very unusual at the time. People would think I was either a prostitute or looking for a man. I decided the best thing to do would be to introduce myself and honestly present my project, but I needed a way to get to know the community. In each community, I would approach the mayor or the president of the municipality and they would hold a meeting with other members of the community, where I would introduce myself and talk about my project. This was a beautifully honest way of going about it, because different people in the community would want to get involved after a...
