Eiffel Tower Photo

The phantom of liberty

Last summer in the French sunshine, a woman in a bright-red burqa hovered like a phantom in front of the Eiffel Tower. In the next frame she appeared in a shimmering, super-blue, head-to-toe covering on the Champs Elysee, with her back to the Arc de Triomphe. Then she moved again and now she's at the coast, the French coast no doubt, with her white burqa fluttering in the wind.

Red. Blue. White. Liberty. Fraternity. Equality.

All of this took place when the debate on Nicolas Sarkorzy's plan on banning the burqa - the full-face covering worn by some female Muslims - was reaching a fever pitch and prompting serious reflections on Islam, multiculturalism, secularism and the definition of freedom or even lifestyle.

Ampannee Satoh, then a student at L'Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Photographie, asked her mother in Pattani to have the full-bodied coverings made in the South for the shoot. In a gesture of personal awakening and social activism, the woman visited France's landmarks and threw the question of freedom back at the Republic through her photos. She could have called her series of pictures "the phantom of liberty", though at the end, Ampannee settled on a single word that never fails to spark international ballyhoo: "Burqa".

"I couldn't walk into Sarkorzy's office and tell him what I thought," says Ampannee, 28, now a lecturer at Rangsit University. "So I did this. I wanted to say something about the issue, about what I believe to be the diversity of our rights, and photography is all I can do."

"Burqa" is currently on show at YAVUZ Fine Art in Singapore. Early next month, Ampannee's nine-picture exhibition will open at Kathmandu Gallery in Bangkok. The opening is scheduled to include a panel discussion on the role of face-covering and the position of Thai-Muslim women on the issue that has become a global debate everywhere from Istanbul to Paris and Pattani.

The photographer's stance on this is clear. Ampannee posed for her own photos in "Burqa", but she doesn't wear one in her daily life. She only covers her hair with an Islamic-style headscarf that still shows her face; this is what most Muslim women around the world do according to the Koranic instructions.

"But I think it's the right of a woman if she wants to cover more - to cover her face with a burqa," she says. "This is a basic right of women, and I'm not asking for more than the right for women to choose what to put on her body, as long as she also respects the rule of society. People say a burqa is a restriction of freedom, but to be able to choose what to wear, I think, is also freedom.

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