In 2011, award-winning ‘art documentary’ photographer Anthony Kurtz was volunteering in Senegal when he saw a clip about a female-owned shop in Dakar on a French television station. “When was the last time I saw a female auto mechanic?… Even in the US!” he wondered.
Thus was born the idea for No Man’s Job, a documentary portrait series that would shed light on women doing the “dirty or tough jobs” performed primarily by men.
The first incarnation of this ongoing series, naturally, turned out to be a feature on the female auto mechanics of Senegal. A friend who works for a women’s organization in Paris introduced him to a Senegalese friend and, before he knew it, he was meeting the women who owned and operated the shops Fatou and Fatou Mercedes, Femmes Auto, and Chicory Mechanique.