After a week in Harper, southeast Liberia, Monrovia has never looked so good. I had a great time and feel incredibly happy with some of the images I made, as well as thoughtful about storytelling more generally. After I interviewed Tim Hetherington for Context Africa, I thought a lot about what kind of photographer I want to be.

The answer? One who drinks cane juice with old men before noon.

(Check out @scarlettlion)

While I was gone, a photo essay of West African teddies was published on BBC, a story was published about Liberia’s museum on the Global Post, and I got an amazing shout out from Newsweek. Stay tuned.

Heading to Harper, in southeast Liberia, near the border with Ivory Coast, in a few hours. Back to blogging in a week or so.

This week’s installment of Context Africa focuses on the work of documentary photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington. For nearly ten years, Tim lived and worked in Liberia covering the war and its aftermath. He made the film An Uncivil War, which he loves seeing pirated on the streets of Monrovia. Now, has a new book of photos out. His work is internationally acclaimed and an important addition to understanding what happened in Liberia. I got a sneak peak at his new photo book Long Story, Bit by Bit when we had coffee at the Mamba Point Hotel last week.

In his own words,

There are two Liberias, two worlds that are far apart but that sometimes intersect. One is the world of Liberians and reflects their individual struggle with history and circumstance. The other is the world of the international community, led by events and the preoccupations and agendas of organizations like the United Nations and international NGOs. The international media often portrays Liberia as a place of abstract violence and faceless individuals. As the only photographer to live with the rebels during the war, I was granted a unique perspective. My evolving work is an attempt to describe how the events of war intersect with personal lives. I want my images to evoke the contrast between inside and outside, the personal and the historical, and the individual and the event.

Context Africa is new series on this blog that highlights projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context. I also hope create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. There’s a lot of daily news out there that is factually incorrect, slanted, or stereotyped. But, there are also a lot of journalists committed to telling a different kind of story.

See previous Context Africa entries: Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgiveness in Rwanda, Nicholai Lidow on post-conflict surfing, and Rob Crilly on how to write about a place as contentious as Darfur.

Tim Hetherington work can also be seen here, on his homepage.

How did this book come to be?

I didn’t think about a book for quite a long time. I was making work in West Africa for general dissemination. I wasn’t thinking, “you make a project and then you make a book,” but it seemed obvious in 2006 that I’d make a book. Then, you spend a couple of years thinking, “What was the book about, what was the project about?” The book is the final project that crystallizes what I was doing. I only finally understood what I was doing when the book was completed and making it was an exercise in figuring that out.

How did you end up in Liberia?

By chance, like so many things in life. I was working in the UK and I found out about a Liberian football team that was coming to the UK. And I thought sports was an interesting way to connect Liberia to the UK. I approached the organizers of the tour and said I wanted to be on the coach when the kids come around. They saw my work and said they were looking for someone to come out and film. They asked if I wanted to go to Liberia. I said, “Sure, where is it?” I first came here in May, 1999.

I remember the first scene that grabbed me. I was walking down Tubman Boulevard and everyone stopped and stood still. They said, “Taylor is coming, Taylor is coming.” He had summoned all the ministers to come to meet him at the airport after a trip abroad. He had a massive convoy of 100 vehicles going full speed down a two-lane street, along with armed vehicles and guys with RPGs and wrap around sunglasses. It was a caricature of Africa. A woman was jumping up and down and saying “Taylor is our lord, Taylor is our lord!” It was the end of one part of the war, but the buildings were dilapidated and broken down. It blew my mind. How can this reality possibly exist in the same world that I exist in?

From there, the project turned out into an inquiry into power. It’s about how young men and women are used politically, and what happens to them and their lives.

My recent work follows similar themes. I did a project in Afghanistan, and it’s about young men and power – how young American men and violence and power come together and how they’re used politically.

How has Liberia changed since you first came here, ten years ago?

Now, Liberia is in a better place. There’s security here, some economic progress, some investment, some political stability, some improvement in some people’s lives, and a great deal of freedom of speech. There’s a desire by the political powers to resurrect justice and democracy. You can see that visually. It’s changing, but it’s too early to say what’s going to happen. You can’t make that call now. Things are still very fragile, the process is going to take ten or fifteen years.

One of the things that I love about this book is that it isn’t just straight war reporting. You include landscapes, portraits, even still life images. Can you tell me a bit about that decision?

I’ve never seen myself as a war photographer. This is about narrative. I’m very open to any visual conceits and any possibilities at my disposal to better explain to people the ideas I’m exploring. I like art photography, I like still life, I like war photography. I like to include everything to weave a tapestry to explain to someone, “What happened?”

A lot of the pictures are metaphorical, and the combination of pictures is metaphorical. This piece of work is almost like a novel. I use narrative book techniques, and I think they’re a more powerful approach than having a lot of war photography. The other thing is I’m working in square format, and that’s a signature of the Liberia work. Working with film slows down your process and makes it more contemplative. I can do square work and it’s fast moving, but I can take a slower photo of an orange, and it becomes something.

(Note: Tim uses a medium format film Hasselblad for almost all of his work.)

What do you hope will come from this book?

For me what happened was that unlike the other people that covered the war, I actually lived with the [LURD] rebels during the war. That was a privileged experience. And I felt the importance of making that public record, and that’s what the book is and why it comes out. And that’s why Uncivil War is so popular here. It’s not just the government, but it’s what people here saw.

The book and photos will tour around galleries and colleges, and I want to create awareness of America’s involvement in Liberia up to a present date. People in America should understand that. Liberia is still like an antebellum plantation system and that needs to be understood.

In the book, I name people and show people who they were. A lot of warlords were using America as a base. The LURD came out of Guinea, but the MODEL came out of America. That’s something that needs to be spoken about. America can have a very destabilizing effect on Liberia.

No one in Liberia will pay $30 for this book. They don’t need to be reminded of what this book contains. They know it. In a few years, I want to make a low cost copy of this book that can be sold here. Something soft copy, printed in China, and then disseminate it here for $2 so people can show their children what happened. But not now. Liberia needs to focus on rebuilding, not what happened. But this generation’s children will need to see it and their children’s children will need to see it.

Buy the book on Amazon, which will be released on June 1, 2009, and see Umbrage Press for more information.

I’m very excited to be partnering with Awava. You can now buy blank greeting cards with images from my time in Uganda at the Awava Marketplace. Some of my favorite photos from Uganda are on sale in sets of five images each. And, just this weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) enter the code

A larger portion of the profit will go towards supporting several groups of people in Uganda who are very near and dear to me. More about that later, so for now, buy a card, an awesome basket or two, and read more about Awava’s amazing work.

Merlin launched a new report on maternal mortality in countries in crisis on May 5. I did some of the photos – you can seem them on the Merlin site, download the report, see a seven photo slide show here, or see more outtakes on my portfolio site www.GlennaGordon.com.

Read more about Mama Zeena, an amazing woman and amazing midwife, on BBC, in the Guardian, and elsewhere.

This is the third installation of Context Africa, a new series that will highlight projects that go above and beyond daily news to tell a story of a place in its context and create an ongoing dialogue about what it means to tell contextual stories in Africa. See also, Jina Moore’s Q and A about forgivness in Rwanda from last week, and Nicholai Lidow on Sliding Liberia.

Rob Crilly is working on a new book project on the always contentious topic of Darfur. Rob’s a stellar journalist whose live tweets during Bashir’s indictment justify the service’s existence. He strives to understand the place, its context, history and future in more than soundbites, more than 600 words, more than angry internet comment forums.

When not riding donkeys across vast stretches of Jebel Mara, he can be found at Java’s in Nairobi filing for the Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other sundry outlets.

His book, tentatively titled “Saving Darfur,” will be published this November.

Interviewing an SLA commander, Ibrahim Abdullah al “Hello”, in En Siro, north Darfur

When and why did you start going to Darfur?

My first trip was in late 2005 after a year trying to get a visa. I’d started the application in November 2004, which was a few months after the world had woken up to what was happening. Sudan had reacted by closing down and most of the reporting was coming from the camps in Chad. None of the Nairobi press pack was getting visas.

How has it changed between then and now?

Everything has changed and nothing. Then the war could broadly be characterized as rebels against government. A poorly equipped African Union force was struggling to protect itself, much less civilians. And I met thousands of new arrivals in the sprawling aid camps.

Since then the dynamic of the conflict has shifted several times over. The worst of the fighting this year has been within and between tribes. The monthly death toll is much, much lower. The peacekeepers are wearing the blue hats of the UN. But in some ways nothing has changed. Thousands of people are still on the move and millions are living in miserable aid camps. The peacekeepers may have changed their hats but there is still insufficient security for people to go home.
How can you as a journalist add complexity, nuance, and context to this over simplified conflcit without losing readers? Or maybe you’re okay with losing readers?

As a journalist it is very difficult to convey the sort of complexity I’ve seen in a 600-word story. There is just not the space. Putting it down in a book is my way of trying to open a discussion about what the conflict – or rather conflicts – are all about.

As far as I am concerned, there would be no point in writing a complicated book about Darfur’s complexities. I don’t want just Africa watchers or Sudan scholars, who already understand its problems, to read it. OK, I’m not going to kid myself that it will top the bestseller charts, but if I can just get a few of the people who listen to George Clooney or who have read Nick Kristof to pick it up, then I’ll be pleased.

The idea is to recount some of my journeys through the region, and keep it as a fast-paced journalist’s eyewitness account. The nuances will come through people I meet and things I have seen – the Arabs living in aid camps or fighting alongside the rebels, the peacekeepers sent on a doomed mission, Chadian rebels in Sudanese towns. Through them I can go beyond the simple black and white analysis of popular perception.

There will be more academic and exhaustive accounts of whether this is genocide, the role of the International Criminal Court, humanitarian interventions and so on. But I hope mine will explore the impact of all these things on the people that matter – the people of Darfur.

United Nations human rights investigators collect account of recent government bombing in the rebel held town of Madu, north Darfur

Can you tell me about your publisher, Reportage Press?

Reportage Press is a newish publisher that specializes in books by journalists. Now is not a good time to be trying to get a deal to write a non-fiction book but Reportage has a real commitment to publishing books that might not get a look-in elsewhere. Yet another book on Darfur, and one that sets out to explore some of its complexity, might struggle to find a home but it’s great that publishers like Reportage are putting this stuff out there. It’s also run by a former journalist and has tight turnaround times, which makes it the right sort of atmosphere for me.

One incredibly contentious issue is how to report the death toll in Darfur and which numbers should journalists trust. Any thoughts on that?

Journalists are in a tough position when it comes to conflict death tolls. We are expected to offer certainty in a situation where there is usually little agreement. For most of us the fallback position is to quote a respected authority, in this case the UN which uses 300,000 as the death toll. This is probably at the upper end of accepted estimates.

Similarly in trying to write about Darfur, it is difficult to get accurate and informed information – especially when writing stories from outside. Aid agencies and the UN cannot say much publicly (for fear of being expelled – although that strategy has clearly failed) and the Save Darfur Coalition has sometimes been caught out exaggerating death tolls and incidents of government violence.

Often though our job is to simplify the incomprehensible into themes that readers can understand: to go from the specific to the general. In the case of Darfur, this has often meant that we have picked up the Save Darfur analysis – Blacks or Africans against Arabs – as our narrative.

So I don’t agree with everything Mamdani says but on the other hand I agree that the broad Save Darfur movement has had a huge impact on the way journalists cover the story. Their advocates are often the only one who can be reached for a comment, for example. And who’s going to turn down an interview with George Clooney? We should have been a little more skeptical of the analysis we were being fed.

Given that a lot of the book will be about your travels, can you give us a preview or a juice anecdote or two about traveling and working in Darfur?

The most dramatic occasion was sitting in a government office in El Fasher as Janjaweed gunmen attacked the town’s market all around us. The man I was meeting raced to the door to escape, stopping only to remove his tie and leaving me sitting at his desk. It took me a moment to realize that not many Sudanese men wore ties. It would have marked him out as a government official, making him a target. A second later it dawned on me that his office was probably not the healthiest place for me to be either.

Al Siir and his taxi. Together we have been in dozens of scrapes, two accidents and one hole.

If what’s happening isn’t bringing us any closer to a solution, is there something that would?

A lot of the pressure for change is coming from outside, from a Save Darfur movement that has polarized the debate. The first step has to be taking some of the heat out of that debate to make it easier to engage with Sudan and also the Arab world, which has largely kept quiet so far. Then the next step is looking for solutions from inside Sudan, in building bridges between the tribes which have become caught up in the conflict. Some of this work is already happening but gets overshadowed in the rush to vilify Khartoum. Then the top tier is to improve relations between Chad and Sudan, another key driver of conflict.

There are no silver bullets. And many of the right processes are in place. The problem is that pressure is too often focused in the wrong places – getting peacekeepers in, the ICC – so that the international community expends all its energy, and political capital at the Security Council, on things that won’t end the conflict.

Last week Context Africa was all about responsible tourism, post conflict, and surfing in Liberia, the week before about reconciliation in Rwanda after horrendous crimes.

This afternoon, I’ll post an interview with Rob Crilly about his new book project on the always contentious topic of Darfur. Rob’s a stellar journalist whose live tweets during Bashir’s indictment justify the service’s existence. He strives to understand the place, its context, history and future in more than soundbites, more than 600 words, more than angry internet comment forums.

When not riding donkeys across vast stretches of Jebel Mara, he can be found at Java’s in Nairobi filing for the Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other sundry outlets.