Check out two cool new photo projects that help break down stereotypes and display more than your standard poverty porn. I also really like that both projects eschew the whole bad news/good news debate.**
The first is Africa Knows (HT: White African) that is a huge databank of the kind of images you can’t find anywhere else – everyday people, living every day lives.
The second is as much a sociology project as a photography project: Middle Class in Africa looks at who the middle class are and what their (usually unseen) lives look like. HT Afrique in Visu.
**More thoughts on this one of these days, but a quick question for all those who complain about all the “bad news” about Africa in the media – when was the last time you read good news in the media about Guatemala? And yes, I do know that Africa is a continent and Guatemala is not, but my point is that most of the media is made up of telling sad stories and bad news.
5 Comments
thanks for the fabulous links.
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good stuff. I was aware of Africa Knows but not the other one. And well said on the perennial issue of ‘bad news’. Easy to quantify it – but nobody ever bothers. And yes, most news is bad.
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Swahili Street Reply:
January 13th, 2010 at 3:12 PM
@Swahili Street, though i’m not sure that ‘middle class’ is a particularly useful category, particularly in east africa, at least
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Thanks for the link and mention. You have some wonderful photos. Hopefully you will one day submit some of them to Africa Knows.
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@Swahili Street – I agree that much of the news isn’t tracked in terms of positive or negative. I also have doubts about the term “middle class.” A Swedish journalist who came to Liberia who I worked with wanted to do a story about middle class Liberia and I told her there wasn’t one. We eventually profiled one of my colleagues who works at UNICEF – makes a steady income, sends his kids to school, has a TV and a small hair saloon that his wife works at on the side. But, he’s not “middle” – he’s upper class. The only thing above him is the disgustingly wealthy elite.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the poverty porn term (and the post you link to) during the Haiti crisis.
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[...] Congratulations to Malick Sidibé on the World Press photography prize! I really love his work so I’m very happy to see that he’s among the winners. And it’s great to see photos that aren’t of poverty porn. [...]
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