Women Finding Empowerment in ‘A World of Smoke’
In an impoverished port city in the Ivory Coast, women formed a cooperative to eke out a living making charcoal from the castoffs of sawmills and workshops.
As Joana Choumali learned when she began documenting the women in 2013, men are happy to sell wood, San Pedro’s largest export, and let women keep the filthy, back-breaking work of making charcoal. Ms. Choumali, a freelance documentary and fine art photographer from Abidjan, the nation’s capital, was on an assignment in San Pedro when she first spotted the phenomenon.