Could you explain how the Cheer Up Luv series started? Some of those stories are so powerful.
I started Cheer Up Luv in 2017, so eight years ago now. It started as a photo series retelling accounts of sexual harassment and street harassment in the place that it happened. I was inspired to start the series when a man walked past me and told me to “cheer up”. That basically ignited all my frustrations and rage about every other kind of normalised harassment that we've brushed off in our daily lives.
It wasn't like the worst form of harassment I'd ever experienced, but it was kind of like the cherry on top. It was the moment where I stopped ignoring all of these things that were incredibly normalised in our society. It forced me to confront some things that I'd been ignoring for a while and also to have some conversations that I'd never had before with my friends. I found that my female friends had very similar experiences and we swapped stories, then my male friends, in that moment, sort of dismissed our experiences. They said they were forms of flattery, and that we were being complimented, and that we were just taking it the wrong way and being oversensitive.
This was pre-MeToo and before any of the widespread discourse that we have online around these subjects now, so it felt quite taboo even having that conversation. I felt very voiceless in that moment and I couldn't really advocate for myself or my friends. I felt quite disempowered and unable to form an argument as to why these experiences were valid and that they weren't compliments, and that they weren't attempts at flattery. That's when I wanted to do something that would prove a point.
So I started taking photographs – of my friends, initially – standing in the place that they had had an experience of sexual harassment – whether that was a street, a train carriage, bus stop, or wherever it might be – and using that setting to tell that story and let the photos and the stories speak for themselves. Very often, a story alone can be really powerful, paired with the confronting image of looking at someone directly in the eyes standing in the place that it happened. I thought: “Well, you can't argue with that.” Obviously, people did, and people will continue to. But that was my starting point for it and I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
I started posting the photos online and posting them on an Instagram account. It just started to blow up more and more and people reached out with their experiences. My entire viewpoint on the issue itself expanded. I realised that this wasn't just something that affected women and queer people in the streets of Britain. This affected people worldwide. That’s when the whole project began to take on legs and started to incorporate more stories, go to different countries, and eventually turn into a platform talking about all kinds of sexism and misogyny.
(Credit: Eliza Hatch/Cheer Up Luv)
When you look at the Instagram feed now, you can see the amount of different work and activism that the campaign has become. What's most striking, particularly as a man looking at it, is to see all of the stories and then every single one has a comment saying “this happened to me” underneath it.
That is something that never ceases to shock and horrify me. The more I do this, you’d think I’d become numbed or desensitised to the horrors. But it's always alarming and overwhelming when you see the true scale of the issue. Even though we're eight years on, it feels like it's ever more present. Misogyny is having a real comeback at the moment, sadly.
That's one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Do you feel that attitudes have shifted either positively or negatively in terms of the way we talk about street harassment, the way we confront it, and how prevalent it is?
I think it's a swinging pendulum. One year, the conversation will feel like it's really progressive, and that it's really going in the right direction. The next year, I feel like we'll be back at square one again, and then two years on we've made some progress, then another year on funding will have been cut for a service that is really vital to survivors. It feels like a constant tug of war with progressing the issue and progressing people's awareness.
I guess the one thing I do think really has improved is a general sense of awareness around young people and older people, people of my generation, about what constitutes sexual harassment. When I started doing this work and I was speaking to people, whether it was on the news or my friends and family, this idea of what counted as sexual harassment was something that was really disputed, and that is not so much the case any more.
There still are wider conversations around consent that need to constantly be had but, as we're seeing with some of these news stories about high-profile presenters or chefs or actors, people feel emboldened to come out and share their stories. I feel like there is more momentum now for those stories to be heard and to be shared, and for people to be believed, than there was eight years ago when we were just at the beginning of the #MeToo movement. Even that needed so much momentum behind it and there still is lots of hesitation when it comes to speaking out.
So I think that the more awareness that we have around issues like sexual harassment really does help with making survivors feel like they can come forward. It’s not like the #MeToo movement happened, and then everything was fixed. It's a constant conversation that needs to be had again and again and again, especially as we're seeing this backlash to feminism – especially in Gen Z. We’ve got young men and boys who think that feminism has done more harm than good. It's a conversation that is unfortunately continual, and we have to keep having it. The work is never done, basically.
(Credit: Eliza Hatch/Cheer Up Luv)
From an artistic perspective, I think the photography in the series is really striking, with the women looking straight at you and confronting the story. How did you decide on that approach from an artistic perspective to telling these stories?
At the time when I started the project, whenever we encountered stories about male violence against women in the news, the subjects were often anonymised or they would be facing away or it could just be a silhouette or something. I felt that there was this lack of connection there. You're reading this really horrible story and, for a good reason, the person doesn't want to show their face. It's completely understandable. But I felt that there was this sort of disconnect, maybe, with how we processed quite difficult subject matters, especially when reading them in the news or reading about them on our phones.
There's a risk of perhaps becoming desensitised to reading horrible things, because we can't identify with the human being behind the story, and we don't know who it's happening to. I wanted to try a different approach where I could get people's attention, get people to stop scrolling and look for a minute. and also be able to see these identifiable locations – really normal, everyday surroundings and places that you walk past every single day.
It reinforces that this isn't extraordinary. This is, really unfortunately, ordinary and it happens every single day to millions of women and people of marginalised genders all around the world. I wanted to really hammer that point, that this is something which is happening on recognisable streets to people that you know. It's just not really spoken about or given the time of day, and I wanted to give it the attention that it deserved.
I wanted to capture something and give it a bit more permanence because these moments are so fleeting, whether it's a comment or a stare or whatever form of harassment that person is experiencing. Often it can be easily ignored by other people and also easily dismissed by ourselves as a form of self-preservation. Quite often, you just think: “I don't want to dwell on that. I just want to put it out of my mind and get on with my day.” It's so much easier to do that than it is to sit with the fact that you've just been sexually harassed for the fifth time in a few weeks. These stories may seem “minor” or “small” to some people, or like not a big deal, but actually they do add up and they deserve the attention and the weight.
(Credit: Eliza Hatch/Cheer Up Luv)
You spoke there about people switching off from the news, especially when it's so troubling – as things like this can be. How important do you think the role is of the arts in raising awareness of these things outside of the news space? Meeting people in their leisure time is often a really good way to get people on board.
I really agree with that and it’s part of the reason why I went down the route that I went down. I find it much easier to communicate the issues I care about through art and I know that it might reach people in a different way than traditional news does. I have loads of friends who say they’ve stopped reading the news because it's just overwhelming. So I think there is a constant need for other forms of storytelling and other forms of getting important issues out there to people. It's important to be able to try and communicate things differently, to try and engage people who might not usually engage in those kinds of issues, and I think that art is one of the oldest and most successful ways of doing that. It's a really powerful tool of expression and reclaiming topics that you may not feel like you have a voice in or that you aren’t allowed to have an opinion on.
I know that was definitely my entry point. I went to art school and had a very artistic background, but not very formal in my education around gender rights and feminist theory. At the time I had no idea what I was really talking about, or the community and issues that I was really entering into. I felt like I didn't have a voice or that my opinion wasn't educated enough.
I had to use the tools that I do feel confident in to carry that for me, and I still do because ultimately I much prefer using photography as a tool for communication than my voice. I do use my voice a lot more now because of the way that my platform has evolved, but I'm still way more comfortable being behind the camera and way more excited and passionate about a project that can communicate on a different level rather than just me talking into Instagram.
You mentioned social media there, and increasingly it seems one of the difficulties that yourself and campaigners are having is the censorship and algorithmic stuff on these platforms. You can't even write the phrase “sexual assault” because the algorithm will deprioritise you for it. How difficult is it to constantly come across that in trying to get your message out?
It's something I'm constantly battling with. It's definitely changed more recently to be even more censoring of certain topics and completely non-censoring of others. You can have misogyny, which is just rife and allowed to thrive on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. And then, for instance, I made a video about marital rape last week because of a horrific news story I was reading about about the countries that it was still not illegal in. It reached very few people because of the words you're using, like rape and sexual assault.
Sometimes, you just think: “What's the point of trying to use this platform to get information out when you don't have any control on how the information is censored, or how that information is engaged with?” Sometimes you feel a little bit disempowered, but I just think you’ve got to keep going and something eventually will land, and when it does it will draw more people in to engage in different ways. Ultimately, I try to use social media as a stepping stone and a tool to be able to do other work like artistic projects and creative projects that can further disseminate that message.
(Credit: Eliza Hatch/Cheer Up Luv)
You've spoken about the ways that your platform has expanded. Could you speak a little bit about where Cheer Up Luv and your wider work is now, and what sort of things you're up to?
It's changed quite a lot in eight years. There was a pivotal moment in the pandemic where it moved from just being a photo series into incorporating other forms of media and storytelling. Something which I'm really passionate about is using different forms of creativity and storytelling to keep myself engaged and excited about doing the work that I do, because I think if I was still just doing Cheer Up Luv as a photo project eight years later – solely photographing survivors and retelling their stories – I think I would have completely burnt out by now because obviously the subject matter can take a toll.
So when the pandemic happened, I decided to let go of some of the rigid ways in which I worked, but also the ways in which the Instagram and social media feed looked. Before then, I had a very clear vision in mind that every photograph had to be taken on film, and it had to be uploaded and look a certain way. I created all these rules for myself, and then when COVID happened, everything went out the window. I started to experiment with doing FaceTime shoots and graphic design and creating a podcast. After the pandemic, I started to do more workshops and talks in schools and put on exhibitions.
Now it's an educational platform and it's very multi-faceted. Photography is definitely part of it, but it sits alongside lots of other things as well, which is exciting for me and keeps me engaged and excited to do the work that I do.
Is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers?
The landscape at the moment is quite bleak. I can understand if people are feeling really unmotivated by this rollback in rights that we are seeing around the world. So I guess I just want to let people know that any kind of action that you take, big or small, does have a really big impact. And it does make a difference.
Times are tough at the moment and I could definitely see a lot of activism fatigue, especially in my sector. Even I started the year really burnt out and feeling really exhausted by the world. I just wanted to let people know that that is really okay. When times are tough, you don't have to be on your A-game every single day, but just focus on the small actions. Those little things add up.
You can see more of Eliza's work by visiting her website and learn more about the work of the Cheer Up Luv project here.
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