Anonymous Portraits and The Beauty of the Mehlfa, by Emma Brown
About the Photographer
Emma is an award winning photographer shooting for a diverse range of Commercial and Creative Agencies, Ethical Brands, Charities, NGOs and more to tell the stories of our modern world.
A visual storyteller who is passionate about political and social issues, Emma is equally at home in the dunes of the Sahara as a hospital in the UK, she’s known for being adept at exploring nuanced depictions of the human experience, with humanity, humility and grace.
You’ll find Emma spending her downtime at the end of the garden in her darkroom, exploring the vintage Wet Plate Collodion process, shooting Tintypes and embracing the slow pace the process demands as an antidote to the hectic pace of our everyday lives.
A passionate PhotoVoice trained educator and facilitator, Emma has led photography workshops with, (amongst others) unaccompanied minor refugees at Play for Progress (UK), students at Half Moon Young People’s Theatre (UK) and activists at Yerevan’s Feminist Library (Armenia). Since 2017 she has been mentoring a group of young photographers in the Sahrawi Refugee Camps (Algeria) and has also co-facilitated the first ‘PhotoAct’ intensive for Anamuh Arts (Hungary) which brings together PhotoVoice and Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies, in a training for Youth Workers from all over Europe.
Anonymous Portraits
Portraits of unaccompanied minor refugees, photographing anonymously to protect the identity of all.
Most of these teens endured harrowing experiences as they journeyed to get to the UK and upon arriving, discovered that the process of gaining asylum is itself is an arduous, lengthy, and traumatic one.
Young people are advised not to have their faces photographed because if dispersed publicly such exposure could put them at risk of re-trafficking. All the same, these young people are teenagers who want and deserve to be seen, heard and represented in public. Working with this specific group of young people over many months, the significance of the resulting final images, when considered in light of their detailed histories, reveal intimate and immensely powerful characteristics of each individual’s personality, culture, ambitions and challenges.
Beharu, Ethiopia
Crina, Romania
Hamid, Kurdistan
Jallal, Afghanistan
Mana, Iraq
Hussein, Sudan
Ionela, Romania
Sam, Eritrea
The Beauty of the Mehlfa
The vibrant traditional dress worn by Sahrawi women of Western Sahara is visually striking against the monotone Algerian Hamada where the majority of the Sahrawi community are refugees today. The Melhfa is a four-meter long by one meter wide piece of fabric, not an ordinary piece of cloth; it's a symbol of Sahrawi heritage, beauty, resistance and of cultural identity, worn with pride by the Sahrawi women of all ages.
Western Sahara is the last colony in Africa & the site of a protracted territorial dispute between the Moroccan Kingdom, which claims sovereignty & the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi liberation movement that seeks independence. The majority of Sahrawi’s are refugees today in the South West Algerian Sahara, one of the harshest desert environments in the world. Despite extreme hardships over more than 44 years in exile, the community has managed to build a democratically run nation-in-exile where women play a prominent role, defying Western preconceptions of Arab-Muslim societies.
