Karima Asaad once ran away – bolted through the hot scrub – from a Tinder date who was sitting on a long-drop toilet on day five of a hike on a remote outback trail, before hitchhiking back up to Darwin.
Soon after, she convinced that same bloke to be photographed sitting on a toilet in a pub during an unlikely – and brief – reunion, to re-enact the scene for a front page newspaper story under the headline Dumped While Taking a Dump.
She has a way of convincing people to do things they didn’t know they wanted to do.
An award-winning visual artist, director and photographer, Asaad weaves women’s perspectives harmoniously into her work, capturing moments that evoke our curiosity and inviting us to engage with the subject.
Her work is raw and slightly voyeuristic.
Her formative years working as a photojournalist and freelance creative photographer in Europe and Australia, trained her tocapture the ephemeral vignettes of life, spontaneous and intimate. Grabbing snippets of life by her lens.
“My creations appeal to women. I want them to take these moments and concepts and ideas that resonate, that reflect them, to such a deep level. And I want to work with brands who have similar perspectives to those women,” she said. “Brands that have a voice that includes men, but at the same time also allows women their own identity.”
The aliveness in her work is enjoyable for both men and women to watch. “I think that’s where we’ve gone wrong with women, is that we’ve taken away their aliveness. Empowering women, giving them the light, but giving an energy to men, watching vital, assured women. What is sexier than that?”
“It is aliveness I capture.”