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Behind The Lens: Photographing Where You Don’t Belong
March 31 @ 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Eleanor Moseman spent most of her adult life, and entire professional career, as a freelance photographer in China. She has over a decade of experience dealing with police, security, border control, and safety as a solo woman traversing lands of foreign languages and cultures. How does one live, work, adapt, survive, and, most importantly, protect the safety of those she documents?
From 2010 to 2012, during a two-year-long and 15,000-mile solo bicycle tour around China, Tibet, East Turkestan, and Central Asia, she found her purpose as a visual storyteller of persecuted ethnic minorities. This trip was Eleanor’s first to overstep boundaries as she was taken into police custody after crossing a Tibetan border without official permits. Fortunately, this happened, because she fell extremely ill during the three-day trip back to the border with a police escort.
For the next decade, she pushed limits, by traveling solo and using her own language skills and cultural understanding to document and share the stories of people she deeply cared about. Eleanor learned how to deal with police wanting to inspect camera gear. It became second nature to identify security cameras and navigate interrogations with grace and intelligence. Not only these issues of safety, but she’s also had to learn how to deal with personal safety while hitchhiking and camping.
Eleanor was also in Tibet when Covid began in 2020. She will share stories on the difficulties of remaining in the area and not being exposed to illness that would have resulted in being locked up with others.
This will be a storytelling event and an open and honest platform for questions and answers.
Even though Eleanor didn’t initially belong where she found herself, you can see through her photography and by her stories that she found her place.
