« I put cameras in the hands of women, the world doesn't want to see...Then I make sure the world has no choice but to look. »
STEPHANIE FANFAN
Griot · Visual Criminologist · Artist Ethnographer
WHO I AM
I am the griot of my family.
In the West African tradition, the griot does not create from nothing the griot gathers, structures, and transmits. They carry the voices of a community so those voices do not disappear. Photography is my medium.
That is what I have always done, before I had the words for it.
I grew up in the banlieues of Paris, the last of ten children, Franco-Haitian and Central African.
I was supposed to be a statistic. I just didn't agree with being one.
I have had family imprisoned. I know what incarceration costs what it takes from a person, from a family, from a child watching from the doorway.
That knowledge is not a wound I carry. It is the foundation everything I build is made from.
I turned grief into architecture…
For five years, I created and ran Beyond Bars a rehabilitation program inside Pollsmoor Prison in South Africa.
Culinary training, guaranteed employment, housing, medical and mental health support.
Real lives changed. When it ended, I didn't stop.
I went back to the source and built something that couldn't be taken away: a methodology.
SNAP Sovereign Narrative Action Protocol is a participatory visual research protocol constructed with incarcerated women as its epistemic origin point.
Not designed for them.
Built with them.
The cameras I put in their hands don't produce illustrations.
They produce data that changes policy.
I am a doctoral researcher in criminology, a visual sociologist, a prize-winning photographer, a former NGO founder, and a co-author of a 25,000-copy bestselling cookbook.
I am not above the women I work with.
Luck was on my side I had a voice, I had opportunities, doors opened that didn't open for everyone.
Afrosoma is how I send the elevator back.
AFROSOMA
Afrosoma is my intellectual laboratory rooted in Afro-diasporic knowledge traditions.
It exists on the premise that the most important knowledge in the world is produced by the people institutions refuse to listen to and that the work of research is not to extract that knowledge, but to build the structures that make it undeniable. The griot does not invent. The griot gathers, structures, and transmits. That is what this laboratory does.
The name carries it: Afro, for the diasporic roots this work grows from. Soma, for the body because knowledge is not only produced in the mind.It lives in experience. My logo inspiration from the bese saka is also a symbol of togetherness and unity. Afrosoma sits at the intersection of visual criminology, participatory research, decolonial epistemology, and Afro-diasporic cultural practice. It is a space for writing, thinking, building, and remembering.
RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY
[ SNAP: Sovereign Narrative Action Protocol ]
A participatory visual research protocol that positions incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women as the epistemic origin of data on prison rehabilitation, not its subjects.
Where existing methods integrate marginalized voices into pre-existing frameworks, SNAP makes those voices the generative source of the framework itself. Participant-produced images function not as illustration but as structured qualitative data, capable of directly informing public policy.
Currently in doctoral field deployment, France, 2026.
[ ITI: Identity Transformation Index ]
The analytical twin of SNAP.
A qualitative composite framework measuring internal transformation across five dimensions: recognition, social capital, socialisation, agency, and exit strategy.
Grounded in the theoretical work of Honneth and more.
ITI reads what SNAP captures. Together they form a complete system where one collects, one measures, allowing the translation into policy.
VISUAL PRACTICE
[ Shadows: Quilombo Kalunga, Brazil (2024) ]
Rather than photographing the inhabitants of Quilombo Kalunga directly, I chose to capture only their shadows. An intentional anti-colonial gesture rooted in the refusal to visually appropriate Black presence.
The camera has a long history as a tool of extraction. Here, it becomes something else: a way of bearing witness without consuming.
This time in the Kalunga Quilombo led to this work and a published chapter in the Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South.
[ Vínculo: Sertão Negro Residency, Brazil (July 2024) ]
A 3-metre-high immersive installation created during the Sertão Negro International Artistic Residency.
Braided hair, coloured ropes, photographs of the Quilombola communities of Goiás and pictures from a participative visual methodology woven into a human-sized spider web.
People didn't look at the work. They walked inside it. The lines between observer and participant dissolved.
That was the point. To change not just what people see, but how they experience the act of seeing.
Full video experience: HERE
[ Les mains du monde (2025) ]
First Prize, Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology at the International Sociological Association, 2025.
This was a photographic work documenting African memories in Afro-Brazilian community.
The hands that carry history.
The hands that built what was never recorded.
The sociological analysis can be found HERE
JUSTICE DESIGN
Beyond Bars Akademia
Cape Town, South Africa (2015 - 2020)
A full-stack rehabilitation institute for women inside one of South Africa's most overcrowded prisons.
Culinary training, guaranteed employment upon release, accommodation, medical and mental health support.
Built from nothing.
Proof that rehabilitation works when it is designed with dignity.
Semifinalist of ECHOING GREEN Fellowship (2020)
Winner program of the YGAP South Africa incubator (2018)
Press videos HERE and HERE
The SNAP Foundation - TBC 2026
The SNAP Foundation is an international archive and think tank on prison rehabilitation, to be established in Europe at the end 2026.
It will be the institutional home of the SNAP protocol: a permanent structure that ensures the knowledge built with incarcerated women does not disappear when the funding does.
Coming soon.
PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS
Sole author of the chapter 'Survival and Resistance: Documenting the Kalunga Community.'
Published February 2026
One of the twenty short stories, like so many intimate windows opening onto the body and mind.
Twenty tales of pleasure, of rare experiences, of winding paths, which touch, excite, provoke, shock, move, liberate, transform and heal. A photographer interprets their words in a hundred images in which the authors embody their characters.
Awarded for Les mains du monde.
Recognised by the International Sociological Association for visual work that advances sociological understanding.
Selected for residency in Brazil to document the Quilombola communities of Goiás. Produced the Shadows series, Les mains du monde, and the Vínculo installation.
[ French Entrepreneur of the Year - French South African Chamber of Commerce (2018) ]
Recognised by the French business community in South Africa for the social impact of Beyond Bars.
Co-authored recipe book with Thibaud Villanova.
25,000 copies sold.
An Amazon bestseller.
Because knowledge takes many forms even drinks and food !
CONTACT
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