I’m an American photographer and journalist traipsing around Africa on the lookout for the ordinary and the extraordinary, using my camera as a pretext to enter worlds not otherwise available.
This space is a scrap book of web and life trawlings – photography, music, arts, politics, and other sundry subjects. It is also a vanity press for my unpublished (and occasionally) published work.
I found the scarlett lion on the roof a friend’s house in Kampala back in 2006 when I went through a crate of discarded items he and a few other artists had gathered. On that day, I was looking for something and I found the lion: a discarded kid’s toy made in China on the cheap, that somehow found it’s way to East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this amazing continent: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
Previously based in Uganda, currently in Liberia. Always roaming.
Even in a place as photographable as Liberia, taking a good photo is much more than just pressing a button on your camera or knowing a bit about exposures.
I’m a professional award-winning photographer with four years of experience in Africa. I’ve been based in Liberia since January 2009, taking photos here and elsewhere that have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, BBC, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, and other places. I also have extensive experience teaching and training photography. For more about my work or background, see my website www.glennagordon.com or my blog www.scarlettlion.com.
I’m offering a one-day workshop where I’ll teach you several tricks of the trade – and mainly how to be comfortable and confident using your camera in interactions on the street and in the field.
The workshop is perfect for anyone who’d like to take better photos, whether you’re an aspiring photographer, an enthusiastic recreational snapper, or you’re just looking for something fun to do next Saturday. It doesn’t matter if you have a point and shoot or an SLR – this class will focus on using the camera you have to the fullest.
We will cover:
-Camera operations and familiarity — how to be comfortable with your equipment
-What makes a “good” photo
-How to engage with people to take better photos
-Take photos that tell stories and show place
-Composition and technique
The workshop will include interactive sessions, hands on learning when we leave the classroom and head outdoors to snap photos, image reviews, and discussions. Because there’s a lot of material to cover, I’m limiting the number of participants to 12 people so that everyone gets the most out of the workshop. The cost is $75 per participant. I’ll need a deposit of $25 by Monday, August 2.
If you have any questions or want to register for the course, drop me a line at glenna@scarlettlion.com.
The road from Monrovia to Freetown takes anywhere from 10 to 16 hours. My journey there took 16 hours, making the return 12 hour trip seem like a breeze. But when you get to the beaches on the Freetown Peninsula, it all seems worth it.
I just spent almost two weeks in Sierra Leone, which almost feels like a middle income country compared to Liberia. More to come soon, but wanted to post this one now as I trudge through and edit hundreds and hundreds of photo files.
July 26 is Liberia’s “independence” day.* It’s a day that’s as much about independence as America’s Thanksgiving is about thankfulness, which is fitting because it’s the freed American slaves referred to as “Americos” who declared Liberia a republic. In the most straightforward sense, this involved an end to the formal relationship with the American Colonization Society, a hybrid company/colonizer/philanthropic effort that shipped the future fathers of Liberia off to this swampy malarial region. The other thing that happened on July 26, 1847 is that the Americos installed themselves as the oligarchical elite that ruled over indigenous Liberias. They never had to make a formal announcement about this – it’s something that’s been announced informally every single day since then.
On July 26, everyone in Liberia spends the day demanding money. “Where’s my 26?” I was asked, umpteen times. Even today, July 27, people continue to ask, “Where’s my 26?”
There are so many other questions implicit on these kinds of days that I wish more Liberians were asking.
*Despite mainstream media reports that declare otherwise, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is an Americo and also is a continuation of the exact same ruling class that has dominated Liberia since the first July 26.
Peter DiCampo, previously based in Ghana but now heading all over the place, made this great multimedia piece about what happens after the lights go out. Make sure you check out Pete’s other work too here. He was also featured on the Lens blog a bit ago and is now on twitter — @peterdicampo.
Happy belated birthday Nelson Mandela! In honor of your 92nd birthday, here’s Tracy Morgan trying out to play you in the movie Invictus. Given the strength of this audition tape, I’m not quite sure why the producers went with Morgan Freeman, but I’m sure that whatever their reasons were, they were good reasons. HT to brother-blogger Grant over at Mo’dernity, Mo’problems.
Thanks to all for the amazing responses on my photos of my grandmother. I almost never post personal pictures, and these ones are especially poignant for me, so it’s nice to get such a warm reception. Here’s one more.
Mosse used Aerochrome, an obsolete technology, to create an alternative image of the complex social and political dynamics of the country. The film, designed in connection with the United States military during the Cold War, reveals a spectrum of light beyond what the human eye can perceive. He aims “to shock the viewer with this surprising bubblegum palette, and provoke questions about how we tend to see, and don’t see, this conflict.”
“I saw this soldier lingering as his commanders talked nearby, and became intrigued by his character; his posture seemed cocky yet vulnerable. His gaze defies the camera,” Mosse wrote. “I knew the vegetation would turn bright pink, and I felt this imposition on his masculinity to be a kind of double violation.”
Generally, I don’t like “gimmicky” photos. Fish eye lens drive me crazy, over saturated images can hide poor composition, and stylization can trump content. But I really like these images. As a photographer interested in Africa, I’ve seen a billion of photos of Eastern Congo. Few stick with me but these ones do. They utilize an alternative process for a purpose and a reason. And in my eyes, they do so successfully.
Readers — do you like these photos? Or do you think they don’t say all that much?
One of the things I started to think about when I was taking the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul was the idea that photography isn’t just something I want to do when I leave my house and go somewhere to take photographs.
Instead, I want to document the world around me.
After I left Istanbul I went to Tel Aviv to visit my grandmother. She’s always been a strong woman and a role model to me. When I was a kid she read to me for hours on end. The Ramona books were my favorites. Until a couple of years ago, she still went on archeological digs around the Mediterranean, worked in the archives to a museum about the diaspora in Tel Aviv, and attended lectures regularly.
Now, she’s still healthy and active. But she has Alzheimer’s, and I know things will only get worse and not better. She’s still the strong woman I remember, but the problem is all that she doesn’t remember.
As most of you probably already know, on Sunday night a series of bombs went off in Kampala at crowded locations where people were watching the World Cup. Over 70 people are already dead and a similar number are injured. Many are pointing fingers at the al-Shabaab.
My heart and thoughts are with everyone who lost someone, and with everyone in Kampala and elsewhere who no longer feels quite as safe.
I found Jason Florio’s work when checking out the winners of the New York Photo Festival. His work stood out among the other projects immediately, and I soon found myself checking out an extended version of a Short Walk Around the Gambia on his homepage and behind the scenes stories on his blog. Definitely worth your time and bandwidth.
As part of PRI’s package about Liberia, Jason Margolis went to the Ducor Hotel and recorded some audio and I produced this slideshow with his piece and my images.
Those of you who read this blog regularly are probably sick of me posting about the Ducor Hotel, but I guarantee this will be my last post about it. I’m sad about that though. I’ve been out of Liberia for a couple of weeks, and while I was gone they cleared the building of the last couple of squatters and have started renovating the building.
That makes this piece my swan song for the Ducor. Maybe one day when it’s a new fancy hotel I’ll have a swim in the pool. But I’ll missing playing with the kids racing down the rough tile on flattened out jerry cans.
That’s the first paragraph of the short story that won the 2009 Caine Prize, a beautiful and sad meditation on life in a refugee camp, used tshirts, and other things. A lot of great short fiction by African authors is available on their website. Definitely worth your time.
I’ve now been to Harper, a small town in southeast Liberia, twice. Visually, it’s a fascinating place. I hope to keep going back there to continue this documentary project. See more images on glennagordon.com.
Liberia’s past and future have been and continue to defined by an antebellum American power structure transported to Africa. That all went up in flames – literally – during Liberia’s civil war in a way that has eerie similarities to the American south and our Civil War.
Harper is an amazing place. It’s a two day drive (or one hour flight) from Monrovia, and was once the capital of an autonomous state called Maryland, the original home to some of the freed American slaves who later founded Liberia. Now, all that’s left of that power structure is vestiges of burned out mansions, a stone mason temple filled with stagnant water, and tributes to a small town boy who made it big, former President Tubman.
Liberia’s story is very much about its relationship to America, and how freed Americans slaves created a social hierarchy here that was an underlying factor in the two decades of destruction and war.
The visual remnants of that legacy in Harper are decaying every day and will soon disintegrate. As they disappear, so too does evidence of an important part of Liberia’s past. I hope to document this place as it is now, and before a new generation of Liberians won’t be able to know where they came from, and subsequently, where they are going.
I love blogging – I love the instant feedback loop, the way this space has become a scarp book for my web wanderings and a vanity press for all that unpublished (and occasionally published) work, and being part of an online community of people who care about and think intelligently about different issues on this vast continent.
But I also have this other website that is ultimately even more important to me than this blog. And that’s www.glennagordon.com – a portfolio of my work as a photographer and journalist. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve uploaded a ton of new content. There’s a new section of my multimedia work, new tearsheets, and new photo essays and stories.
I love photos that explore ideas and that’s exactly what Carl de Keyzer does in his series “Congo (Belge)” featured on the New Yorker Photo Booth today. The photos are unusual – at times disconcerting and at times engaging, and at most times both. Definitely worth your bandwidth.
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