Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses Maya Goded’s album 'Good Girls', which contains images of prostitutes working in Mexico City. It focuses on ethical tensions involved in socially engaged documentaries using Good Girls as an example in the context of Mexican photography and its representations of marginality.

Paper long abstract:

Maya Goded is one of the most renowned contemporary Mexican photographers. The subject of this paper will be her album entitled Good Girls (2006), which contains images of prostitutes working in the oldest red-light-district of Mexico City. After briefly situating Goded in the context of Mexican photography and its relationship with representing marginality, I will focus on the ethical tensions involved in socially engaged visual production using the Good Girls as an example. I will analyse the role of photography in highlighting the marginal situation of its deprived subjects and forging a cultural space for otherwise unrepresented or underrepresented people, while taking into consideration the risks of fetishizing and commercialising the suffering of others. To that end, recent theoretical debates about ethical ambiguities in documentary photography will be considered. My close analysis of a selection of photographs from the album will exemplify different representations of women within the frame of their internal displacement. The images' potential for empowerment as well as exploitation will be considered. The main goal of this examination is not to determine the moral value of Goded's engagement with the people she photographs, but to focus on teasing out the ethical intricacies of representing and looking at images of subaltern subjects.