See ya next year!

Something amazing has happened: as a result of a story I’ve worked on, there are now people out there in the world who know about a modest group home for the elderly in east Freetown. Some of the images I snapped there last July and August have been published on BBC’s website, in their Focus on Africa magazine, mentioned on the HelpAge blog, and one will be part of a group show at PowerHouse Arena, a gallery in Brooklyn.

I’ve received an outpouring of emails about the residents of King George’s home. An outpouring in really only about a dozen emails, but still, that’s a lot. People want to help. They want to give money and other kinds of donations.

But here’s the thing: I don’t know how to use this good will effectively. King George’s doesn’t even really have an address, let alone an international bank account to which people could transfer funds.

So far, I’ve been directing people to HelpAge. But it does seem that if people want to give to King George’s, they should be able to. When I’m back in Sierra Leone next month, I’ll speak with the director about how to make this process a possibility.

But even then, I question how it will work. I don’t know how to see that the money benefits the residents. I’m not an aid worker, nor am I prepared to take on that kind of role.

I’m thrilled that people who see these images might care a bit about some old folks in Sierra Leone they’ve never met. I mean, that’s the point, right? But while this might have “raised awareness”, I’m not sure that anyone’s life at King George will be significantly different because of these images.

Maybe that’s enough for now.

Lucy Elizabeth Dacowah, aka Reverend Lucy, dressed up to go into town on the day of this portrait. She wore a necklace that said “Jennifer.” When I asked her why she was wearing a necklace that said Jennifer when her name was Lucy, she replied, “What’s a Jennifer?”

This is a neat Q&A with Evelyn Groenink, director of the Forum for African Investigative Reporters, posted on the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s new project Africa Media Matters. It’s nice to hear about journalists in Africa really committed to investigative work, and, perhaps the most amazing part is that the FAIR director even says they’re getting more and more members every week.

On Saturday night at 7 pm, I’ll be speaking briefly about Harper, Liberia at Culturefix, a bar and gallery on the Lower East Side in NYC. The event is a benefit for arts revitalization in Liberia, a project started by a couple of friends and supported by Creative Visions.

Here’s a bit about the project:

Visions of Hope is a public arts initiative designed to take place from January through May 2011 in the most desolate and isolated region of Liberia. Christina Mallie, a curator and arts educator in New York City, and Laurie Reyman, a social worker currently working in Liberia with an international NGO, have joined forces to direct this project which will mark a turning point in the physical and psychological landscape of the town of Harper where every third or fourth building is a burnt out structure that looks exactly as it did when the fourteen-year civil war finally ended in 2003.

During these five months, a local arts council will be created and fifty-six youth from eight public schools in Harper will convene. We will mobilize to transform the war torn landscape, unchanged from Liberia’s civil war, into one which expresses hope and the future of Liberia through the creation of four murals in Harper.

Fifty-six youth will have the opportunity to engage creatively in transforming their home town under the guidance of the local arts committee into a positive visualization of the change Liberians want to see in their lives and country. The project will encourage Liberian youths’ capacity for personal achievement through self-expression and creativity, while enhancing their civic interest and engagement and fostering their role as positive contributors to society. A filmmaker will document the visual and psychological transformations as the project unfolds and produce a multi-media piece that will be shown internationally.

In May 2011 Mr. Fato A. Wheremongar of ChildArt Liberia will join the Visions of Hope public arts initiative and hold a three-day teacher training workshop on teaching the arts in schools with eight teachers from the pre-selected schools in Harper Liberia . The workshop will contribute to renewing a sense of creativity and appreciation for the arts among residents of Harper.

Visions of Hope places much faith in the belief that it can be a starting point, a potential catalyst, for further actions inspired by the evidence of change expressed in the murals. The initiative will work to rehabilitate and rejuvenate the Liberian population through these visual expressions of the future of their country.

If you’re in New York, please come by and say hello.

As you can see, Harper could certainly use a fresh coat of paint.

Photo from West Africa Always Wins

Pauline, a journalist in Abidjan, posted this photo of former president, and current sorta president, Laurent Gbagbo, on state television. “One thing is clear: as long as [state media] controls the airwaves, Gbagbo controls the population,” she says. Gbagbo, who has ruled Ivory Coast for 10 years, and delayed elections umpteen times, just lost the election, but has had himself inaugurated anyway. His oponent, Alassane Ouattara, who won 54 percent of the vote, has also been inaugurated in a parallel ceremony.

This is similar to, though slightly worse than when two celebrities wear the same dress to a party.

For more on this, make sure to follow the BBC’s John James on twitter, check out this analysis of possible short term and long term outcomes of the situation from Reuters, and read all of this bit of analysis from FT (gated, but all you have to do is register to read it):

In effect, this is a coup and should be treated as such. The UN, which helped bankroll the $400m cost of the polls, has refused to accept the outcome. The African Union, regional bloc ECOWAS, France, the US, Britain and the International Monetary Fund have all recognised Mr Ouattara’s victory.

While this exceptional unanimity is to be commended, it is unlikely to be enough. Mr Gbagbo is a stubborn adversary. Events moreover are conforming to his chosen narrative: that Ivory Coast has long been victim of an international conspiracy to rob it of its sovereignty.

Western donor countries are partly reaping what they have sown. A string of dubious elections in Africa has gone unchallenged. Going through the motions may have become a pre-requisite for international acceptance, but it has rarely proved necessary to offer real democracy.

The west would do well to allow African leaders to take the lead; they have every reason to do so and have been strikingly firm in their stance so far. This fiasco carries the risk of fresh conflict and of cementing the country’s de facto partition. This is not only destabilising for neighbouring states, recovering from civil wars, but also a dangerous precedent that could, without care be replicated in other parts of Africa.

These elections are getting far more coverage in the Western media than Burundi’s pretty much widely ignored ballot experiment, or Guinea’s similarly widely ignored ballot. But as Reuters reports, at least Cluff Gold mines in Ivory Coast are still operating! This is also directly related to why anyone is reporting on this election at all. The gold, and the cocoa, that is. Production  and export of cocoa is expected to be delayed.

This may seriously impede Gbabgo’s attempt to have his (chocolate) cake and eat it too.

A couple of weeks ago, Pete Brook over at Prison Photography wrote a great blog post comparing Burkina Faso-born Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo’s photos of e-waste in Ghana with South African Pieter Hugo’s images. Ouedraogo is currently a contendor for the prestigious PrixPictet award for this series.

Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo

Pieter Hugo

Brook says:

In truth, I don’t want to criticise the work of a photographer from Burkina Faso. When was the last time a photographer from Western, Eastern or Central Africa was shortlisted for a major photography prize? We should be celebrating the recognition. But Ouedraogo shouldn’t win; the project is not polished enough… Hugo was very quick at turning his images round. They were distributed within months of his 2010 visit to Aglobloshie. Yet, it was Ouedraogo who went to the toxic site first; in 2008, a full two years before Hugo set up his camera… Both photographers emphasise the prevalence of child labour, the presence of grazing livestock and the use of found tools and noxious open fires to extract copper from the scraps. If you look at the statements by Ouedraogo and Hugo they contain virtually the same info.

Again, it is the story that is of primary importance, here.

The ultimate question then, is which portfolio is best likely to capture the attention and imagination of viewers enough for them to shift their worldview of politics, consumption and globally connected “growth”? (“Growth” is the theme of the Prix Pictet this year.)

Hugo’s work sells in galleries. It’s square and poised for market, which is some irony. Hugo’s is bleak look at the conspicuous naivete of the Western consumer as reflected in the innocent naivete of the young E-Waste breakers. Ouedraogo’s work is more art-documentary with use of photojournalist angles, some portraits and shots of the expanses of computer carcasses. Ouedraogo’s work is less cohesive.

I think he’s posing some interesting questions here and doing some daring, necessary, comparisons.

Perhaps I’m just a cynic, but I think neither series is likely to impact the practice of shipping e-waste to Ghana, which Brook uses as a meter stick for comparison. And if we’re looking at the photos themselves rather than any subsequent results, or lack thereof, the most interesting question to pose is how different photographers tell stories, and what affects the decisions they make when conceptualizing, planning and executing projects.

It’s also worth noting that many photographers have done projects on e-waste: Jane Hanh, Andrew McConnell, and Alvaro Ybarra Zavala, just to name a few.

This photo by McConnell is my favorite — it implicates the viewer, who is most likely looking at the image on a computer screen, and involves us in the task at hand with visceral immediacy, yet through its use of framing, also creates a barrier that necessitates introspection.