Shedding Light on Female Circumcision   

Female circumcision, a rite of passage in several African and Arab nations, is a subject most people don't even want to discuss, much less witness.

That wasn't the case with Stephanie Welsh, 22, who won this year's Pulitzer Prize for feature photography with graphic photos she took of a female circumcision ritual in Kenya. (The photos were distributed by Newhouse News Service.) Welsh, a photography intern at the Palm Beach Post when the awards were announced, is among the youngest winners ever, and possibly the only person ever to win while still an intern.

Welsh, a recent graduate of Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, took a year off from her studies in the summer of 1994 to intern at the Nation, an English-language daily in Nairobi. Harry DiOrio, photography director for Newhouse's two newspapers in Syracuse, where Welsh had interned the previous spring, gave her 100 rolls of film to take with her to shoot a story about the spread of AIDS in Africa. But Welsh had her own story in mind, a story that she had to pursue on her own time because the Nation had no interest in it.

Before she left for Africa, Welsh had read a book by Alice Walker on female circumcision, known more politically but also more accurately as female genital mutilation, and once she arrived she wanted to see the practice for herself and form her own opinions about it.

"It's so hard to relate my world to theirs," Welsh says. "They take this as a really significant rite of passage, and you can't come in and condemn them wholesale without figuring out what it means to them."

So she set out to do just that, traveling by herself that December to a Maasai village where she witnessed and took photos of a circumcision, but ultimately left disappointed. In this particular village, many of the villagers had come in contact with Westerners before and knew that white people generally condemned the ritual.

"They asked me to go milk cows during the ceremony," she says. "They tried to shield a lot from me, to make it seem less severe."

Welsh thought she had failed, but the images of the ceremony stayed with her. Determined to be better prepared for her next opportunity, she began learning the native language and searching for a more rural village where she would be accepted with fewer preconceived notions.

Welsh took a day-long bus ride in April 1995 to a remote part of Kenya called the Samburu district. After earning the trust of the village's spiritual leader, she lived with a Samburu family in a hut made of cow dung, sticks and straw, purchasing a goat to feed herself and the family. She became the proverbial fly on the wall and eventually got the opportunity to take the pictures that would earn her the Pulitzer.

"I would get these sinking feelings in my stomach that I wouldn't be able to sit through it," says Welsh. "But at some point you have to know that you have no control over it and that you can't stop it. I had to believe that my work would mean something just to get the strength up to do it."

But even though Welsh says she hoped her pictures would have impact, she never imagined the impact they would have on her career. While deciding where her post-Pulitzer career would take her, Welsh was courted by several papers, including more than a few in the Newhouse chain.

"It's such an honor to win, but it doesn't change what I do and what I've always wanted to do," she says. "I'm just so glad that winning has brought the issue to light a little more."

Toren Beasley, director of photography at Newhouse News Service and a key player in Welsh's road to the Pulitzer, says Welsh's sensitivity and maturity are what set her apart from many other photographers. "There were a lot of issues that Stephanie had to deal with in this project--preserving the dignity of the woman who is the subject without exploiting her, and showing the photographs in a social and cultural context," Beasley says. "It's rare for a young photographer to care about those nuances, especially when you have an opportunity to take amazing pictures that you know will attract attention for their sensational value alone."

"She has an excellent eye and she's very talented," adds DiOrio, who first suggested showing the photos to Newhouse, figuring they wouldn't get the exposure they deserved if published only in the Syracuse papers. "But she is also a deep thinker."

Welsh says she is fortunate that she no longer has to do any deep thinking about where her photojournalism career will take her next. After much deliberation, she has decided to stay with the Palm Beach Post as a staff photographer. "I'm just grateful about all the doors that have been opened," she says, "and grateful not to have to worry about getting a job."