Eliza Tobias, 20, and her sister-in-law, Alefa Banda, 22, Ntchisi District, Malawi, May 2022.
British-Egyptian photographer Laura El-Tantawy will never forget the words of one woman she met while working with the charity WaterAid in Malawi.
Delia Laiford, a 56-year-old grandmother, told El-Tantawy how it felt to live – and give birth – without access to clean water. The woman explained she had lost eight of her 14 children, some of them in childhood, and that she hoped never to return to life with dirty water, poor sanitation, and a lack of hygiene in health centres.
Emilida Laison, 35, in the kitchen area of the guardian shelter at Kangolwa Health Centre, Malawi. Emilida is the guardian for her sister, who has just had her baby. As mothers wait for labour and their trip to the wards, guardians usually cook, wash and care for them.
“Water is something I wake up every day worrying about,” Laiford told El-Tantawy. “I have so many worries – it’s like I have nowhere to run to.” Her fears are still real – she lost her seven-month-old grandson to diarrhoea.
Laiford is just one of the women that El-Tantawy met while working in the district of Ntchisi for WaterAid, a charity attempting to make clean water and decent toilets possible for everyone within a generation.
The award-winning photographer witnessed for herself the difference that unpolluted water, toilets and a hygienic health centre could make to pregnant women and mothers. WaterAid has helped provide these essentials for ten clinics in Ntchisi, including Kangolwa Health Centre near Laiford’s village. The statistics, though, are still bleak – almost one in four healthcare facilities in Malawi are without clean water on site.
The reflection of Enala Etifala, 19, in a container of water. Enala's guardian had to collect water from a stream near Kangolwa Health Centre so she could clean herself after giving birth. “The water was dirty and not good,” says Enala. “I had to use the same water to drink from.”
“It’s a shocking fact that globally a woman gives birth in a health centre without clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene every two seconds – that’s 16.6 million women a year,” says El-Tantawy. “No woman should have to go through that.”
The result of her work with WaterAid is Carrying Life: Motherhood and Water in Malawi, a multimedia exhibition now showing on the banks of the Thames near Tower Bridge, London.
“Situated aptly along the River Thames, the exhibition is a reminder of how far out of reach the idea of water is for millions of communities around the world,” says El-Tantawy, recipient of the W Eugene Smith Memorial Grant 2020. “Delia’s words echo the emotional sentiment around water and essentially the feeling I was trying to articulate in the photographs.
“I always approach storytelling from an emotional point of view. I’m interested to understand how people feel – showing something is simple, but expressing complex human emotions in an image is what I aspire to convey.”
In the village of Chimwala, Malawi, women fetch water by night to avoid the long queues at the pump during the day. This can be frightening, but with no other clean water source nearby it is the only way they can provide for their families.
Born in Worcestershire, England, and educated in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the US and the UK, El-Tantawy began her career as a photojournalist for American newspapers. In 2005 she started freelancing and moved to Cairo, where her experiences were to transform her career and her life. Beginning as a journey to understand her roots in Cairo after the death of her maternal grandmother, El-Tantawy's series In the Shadow of the Pyramids soon began to take on a nation’s struggle for identity. It led to her being one of four artists nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2016.
The series, spanning nearly a decade, explores life under the totalitarian rule of President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak, leading up to and including the revolution of 2011-13. Documenting the protests in Tahrir Square, Cairo, left a particular mark on the photographer, who describes her work during that time as being deeply personal.
“It has meant everything to me, personally and professionally,” says El-Tantawy. “To be there at such a critical historic moment was momentous, it was euphoric, it was formative. It nurtured my Egyptian identity in a way I had been longing to explore.
Enala Etifala, 19, lives near Kangolwa Health Centre, Malawi, and gave birth a year ago, before the clinic had clean water.
“When you are questioning your own sense of self and belonging and suddenly you realise an entire generation and country is on the same path – it was a humbling revelation and a moment of solidarity.
“During the nearly 10 years I spent on that journey my photographic voice really came into being. Because I knew the story so well, there was a sense of authenticity and urgency to my photographs. The images are my own diary of this chapter in my country’s history. Diaries by their nature are commemorative and consequential, and In the Shadow of the Pyramids bears those emotional sentiments for me.”
Lustiya Banda, 32, who gave birth at Ntchisi District Hospital, Malawi, when it had no water. At that time, her guardian and mother-in-law spent three hours each morning fetching water for her.
So, with a life spent between continents, where does El-Tantawy feel she most belongs?
“Being in the presence of family and loved ones is where I feel most at home,” she says. “This could be anywhere in the world. Fluctuating between physical territories in the way that I have is extremely rewarding, but it comes with emotional consequences.
“This is something I have been exploring in my work. It is in this process that I’ve worked on liberating the idea of home beyond border and place — home can be a feeling, a person, an idea, an aspiration or an eternal dream. Home is something I carry within me.”
From the series In the Shadow of the Pyramids, 2005-2014
All images except the above photograph are from the series Carrying Life: Motherhood and Water in Malawi by Laura El-Tantawy/WaterAid.
The exhibition Carrying Life: Motherhood and Water in Malawi is free and open daily at Riverside, More London, until 14 April 2023. You can find out more and donate to WaterAid here.
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