Sana Badri

a conversation with Sana Badri
by Anne Kimunguyi 

Sana Badri works and lives in London. As a photojournalistic and documentary image-maker, she captures the city she lives in and the communities that make it. In doing so, her work aims to create and maintain a visual dialogue with the people she photographs. In her two-year project ‘Where the Fire Went’ (the series’ title borrowing from Lauryn Hill's ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’), Badri captures the training and tournament activities of London’s Amateur Boxing Alliance (ABA). Honing in on the relationships of care, competition, and mutual respect that unfold within and in between matches, Badri’s photographs seek to establish a sense of familiarity between her subjects and the viewer. 

Much of your work locates a specific scene or hub of activity – the market space, urban cyclists, a boxing arena – and the activities or interactions that emerge in these spaces are documented in your photography. There’s a continuality between each body of work, almost like a visual mapping of pockets of locality, strung together throughout your wider practice.

What draws you to a particular space?

I'm interested in how communities figure out ways to create spaces that allow for care, support and joy, in spite of the complete lack of resources afforded to them. With all the odds stacked against us, in a city that has been operating in ways that work to constantly push us out, we resist, and we remain.

Each place I photograph I have some kind of relationship with that I then try to explore further with the camera.

Are there specific ways in which communities interact that you look for in a scene?

People can only gather to connect and care for one another if there is a space that allows them to do so, in ways that feel comfortable for them. Communities, memories and traditions are all built on the foundation of having somewhere that is yours in some way or another. When people are separated from their built environment, their way of life has to change drastically to adapt to the new space.

One of the projects around bikes included photos around a bike shop in Hackney that used to be a place where kids in the area would hang out for hours on end, build intergenerational relationships and learn skills, all completely for free. There was no transaction. Noise complaints from gentrifying neighbours resulted in the shop being closed down, and since then kids have never gathered on that street in quite the same way. I was drawn to that space in particular because I taught down the road from that shop for many years, and was also involved in some youth work where we would take some of our young people to that shop for bike repair workshops.

Memories are tethered to the places they occurred in - seeing a place brings back. Just as the removal of those spaces allows for so much to be forgotten. I want to resist forgetting. I want us all to remember. We were here and we loved each other.

In Where the Fire Went, you focus on a local boxing centre, documenting scenes of preparation and competition between fighters. Depictions of vulnerability and intimacy run throughout the series. A young boxer has his hand bandaged by an older man -  presumably his coach - as they converse. Two boxers are pictured embracing each other – the stillness of the photograph figuring the moment as an intimate embrace, rather than a potential mid-fight struggle. Elsewhere, a shot of someone’s wrist mid-wrapping (or unwrapping), the rosy cartoon shown on the fabric switching focus from injury to an image of comfort and delicacy. These images of care, pensiveness, and compassion fracture the aggressive and domineering associations typical of the male-dominated sport.

What balance, if any, does the camera strike in depicting, interpreting and/or constructing such vulnerability in a scene? How do you conceive your role as a photographer in navigating the gaps between the moment occurring and its photographic depiction?

For me, the intimacy infused throughout these photographs present possible alternate readings of masculinity as vulnerable and constitutes a dreaming or imagining of sorts.

What drew me to document the amateur boxing scene was how clearly I felt I could see the reasons that drew the young people I work with to participate in the sport. The fight is obviously a big part of it, but I saw young people start training because a respected elder took the time and care to pay attention to them, to guide them and chat to them about their potential and their progress. The profound impact I saw those relationships have on these young fighters really moved me. All we want is to belong and for our efforts to mean something, there is such an immediacy to those desires being fulfilled by training and stepping into the boxing ring. The intense physicality of the sport also necessitates an equally intense care and attention, the helmets being tied for you, the handguard being wrapped, the watchful eye of the coach during the fight throwing in the towel if it ever appears imbalanced or cruel. A boxer and a coach when the fight begins are suspended in a moment of total symbiosis. 

The vulnerability appears, at least to me, just as much of a fact in boxing as the violence is. My efforts with the camera are to capture as much as I possibly can of both.

Anne Kimunguyi is a London-based writer, editor and arts administrator.

This work was featured in Splash & Grab’s exhibition DREAM STATES, curated by Hannah Geddes.
Sana Badri was a member of Splash & Grab’s studio residency with BOW ARTS.