A weekend or two ago, I went out to Staten Island for the last time before I head to Liberia next week to cover the elections. My time in New York has been busier than expected, and I didn’t get out to the Island as often as I would have liked to, but I’m still happy to have formed relationships with the Liberian community there. Every time I arrive on Park Hill Ave, someone calls out my name. “Sis G! How you?” and it’s like I never left Monrovia. But then I glance up at the walls of New York Housing projects, the parking lots filled with American teenagers, and I know I have.

I’ll be back in New York in November, and complain about the cold and missing Liberia with my friends on Park Hill.

See more of my project from Staten Island here on GlennaGordon.com. 

Please stop by and take a look! Feedback always welcome. And now, my love of neon, lions, and blogging all coalesces in one space.

Big thanks as always to Joi Foley of Atomic Heart.

There’s a new report out from Amnesty International on the state of prisons in Liberia. You can also see photos on BBC, and other images on glennagordon.com.

Yesterday, I spent the day at Ground Zero. I was out of the country on September 11, 2001, studying abroad in Budapest. And I’ve been out of the country for half of the decade that’s passed since then.

Though I’m American and a (sort of) New Yorker, in many ways, this doesn’t feel like my tragedy. Or, at least it didn’t.

The morning was spent dodging police barricades, trying to navigate a highly secure space and find visual instances that resonated emotionally. The challenge wasn’t just logistical – I think it was also my disconnect. But as time passed, I listened to so many names being recited, and I found myself in the middle of a Fire Department bag pipe show, something changed.

See some of my images in the Bloomberg Businessweek slideshow here, and more below.

Makeshift is a cool new project currently looking for funding through Kickstarter. If funded, the new magazine will feature ingenious solutions often spurred by a lack of resources.

As populations explode and resources dwindle, the ability to innovate under constraints has become a more pressing competency for individuals, companies, and governments. To document resourceful production Makeshift looks to the grassroots: to the garage tinkerers and under-the-radar businesses that make up the global informal economy. This sector of primarily unprotected and unregistered businesses accounts for over three quarters of employment across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These maker-entrepreneurs are resilient, flexible, and immensely creative.

The editors of Makeshift noticed that production, more than at any point in the last century, is occurring at the grassroots. In different cultures it goes by different names: DIY in the US, jugaad in India, jua kali in East Africa, and gambiarra in Brazil. Makeshift seeks to unify these cultures into a global identity.

Makeshift is a global network of editors, researchers, journalists, photographers, and videographers uncovering stories of street-level ingenuity. The core team is based in New York, Mexico City, Singapore, and Madrid. Contributors in over 20 countries are searching for stories of street-level ingenuity.

Each quarterly issue of Makeshift will form an engaging and in-depth snapshot on a particular branch of informal creativity. The website will feature complementary media, including videos and blogs. It’s a hi-fi representation of a lo-fi movement.

The inaugural issue of Makeshift, released September 30, will be themed “Re-culture: Reuse, repair, and recycle at the grassroots,” featuring stories such as everyday product hacks in Kenya, industrial fabric recycling in India, improvised tools in Myanmar, recycled art in Colombia, and adaptive reuse of industrial sites in the United States.

Check it out and chip in a few bucks if you can.

This week’s international edition of Time has a three page spread on bar coding trees in Liberia the features my images. Honored and deeply saddened to share the third page with an image by Tim Hetherington. 

Filed under: no amount of money I wouldn’t pay to witness this Skype call. HT to Shelby Grossman.

So…

Crazy news about the first female African head of state and Liberia’s sitting president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, huh? Announcing her candidacy for 2011 so soon! Wow. What do you think of her chances? I think she’s a shoo-in, but I’m admittedly a bit concerned about Prince Johnson making some last minute strides, especially amongst the Gio people in the Nimba region. I’m thinking of launching a letter writing campaign on behalf of EJ-S or at least cold calling potential Nimba voters over Skype.

Oh, how gauche of me! I’ve just been chattering away incessantly like some kind of boy or girl who talks a lot. I haven’t even properly introduced myself. Although, one often gets the uneasy sense that patriarchy dictates a learned and ultimately damaging order of events with men taking an unearned lead. My name is Terri, with a heart over the i, instead of a dot. I have a heart, is what that says, and I’m not afraid to wear it on my sleeve.

Super interesting post from Beth Dickinson about  the rise in African born immigrants in the USA and this demographic shift:

We’ve known for some time that the numbers of African-born immigrants coming to the United States are on the rise. But new data published by the Migration Policy Institute offers an incredible new look at the shape of the new communities across America. Over the last 30 years, the African born population has grown from just 200,000 people to 1.5 million. And while Africans still make up just 3.9 percent of the total foreign-born population, that share is growing fast. In 2010, for example, nearly 10 percent of new green card recipients were born in Africa…  Compared to native-born Americans, African immigrants are more likely to hold higher degrees. They’re more likely than the foreign-born population overall to speak English. And they live in urban areas—including nearly a quarter who live in the New York and Washington D.C. metro areas. In other words, they are educated, organized, and right next to the centers of power.

What’s worse than voluntourism? Voluntarily hanging out with the rebels in Libya. From the National:

Chris Jeon, a 21-year-old university student from Los Angeles, California,shrugging cooly, declared: “It is the end of my summer vacation, so I thought it would be cool to join the rebels. This is one of the only real revolutions” in the world…

Only a few friends back in Los Angeles knew his true plans, he admitted. His family? Well, they thought he was going on a different trip.

As he recalled that deliberately vague version of his itinerary, it dawned on Mr Jeon that he might be blowing his cover by speaking with a reporter on a far-flung stretch of desert more than 11,200 kms (7,000 miles) from home.

Interesting analysis in the Economist on the current famine in the Horn of Africa and what has, and hasn’t changed since the 1980s:

IN THE worst hunger crisis the world has seen this century, in the Horn of Africa, 29,000 children may already have perished. More are certain to. But apart from hand-wringing, what have been the reactions to the famine?

The world might think it has moved on since the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85. But charities are using the same emotive photos they used then to pitch for money. Television cameras are just as intrusive—perhaps more so. Camera crews have been thrown out of a hospital in the Dadaab refugee camp, in Kenya, in an effort to preserve the dignity of the patients. “Without pictures it is difficult to get action,” laments an Ethiopian government official…

For better or for worse, the famine is useful platform. Many of the world’s development ministers have made the trek to Dadaab, in part to boost the profile of their ministries. Deborah Doane of the World Development Movement, a lobby for “fairer world trade”, points out that donor money only buys half as much food as it did a decade ago. The steep rise in food prices, she argues, is the result of speculation in the futures markets; the famine is a chance for stricter financial regulation. In the end though, everyone looks to the sky. As one World Food Programme official notes, “aid cannot make it rain.”