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 It is also a vanity press for my unpublished (and occasionally) published work.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.
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.
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?
A couple of weeks ago, Foreign Policy ran one of those not-all-that-informed lists they called, “Postcards from Hell: Images from the World’s Most Failed States.” Normally, this isn’t the kind of thing I would even bother commenting on. I disagree with the premise, so criticizing the execution seems pointless. However, since one of my photos of Liberia is featured in the series, here comes some pointless criticizing!
I took this photo circa November 2009 at a market in Paynesville, a part of Monrovia pretty far from the city center. It was a nice market. I bought some lapa while I was there, took some photos, and chatted with a couple of old ladies. And for the record, let me say that’s about as hellish an afternoon as I can imagine!
“You’ll know a failed state when you see it,” FP writes. But in my book, a list that includes Yemen and Somalia in the same breath as Ivory Coast and Liberia isn’t going to tell us that much. But the problem is not how little it tells us, it’s how many people like what it has to say: as of today, more than 4,500 people had posted a link to this on Facebook.
Thanks FP, for often providing great news and analysis, and every now and then providing crappy link bait.
Before I even clicked on the link, I knew which photos he was talking about. I’d seen them, months earlier, and they struck me as somewhat off. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but the dark and eerie photos didn’t look anything like the country I’d lived in for two years. I was in Uganda in January when I saw them and put up this tweet:
Third, it’s clear that regardless of the specifics, Marco has made some dubious decisions. I think that’s something you can see in his photos, and perhaps why I felt some much discomfort when I first viewed them – not because he was uncovering something shocking, but because something was wrong. I’ve always said that how you take a photo affects how the photo looks.
Finally, I don’t like Marco’s photos because they don’t tell me anything I don’t know. They only make me think about him, and what he did to get into the particular situation that resulted in the photo.
Here’s the photo on the homepage of his website. It doesn’t tell me anything about the world or the people in the image, it just makes me think why on earth did that dude and those two women let him stand above him while they were having a sexual encounter? And what did Marco say to get them to agree to this? It’s voyeurism - nothing more.
Marco’s actions were clearly unethical. But enough has been said about that already that I don’t feel the need to say more here. Instead, I’d like to end with a word about a photographer’s approach. Did he have the best of intentions? Perhaps. But did he have his subjects’ best interests as his primary priority? No. He says he exhumed the body so that he could expose a wide spread problem. But had he instead respected the needs of the people with whom he was interacting, that respect would show in the photograph and ultimately it would do far more to promote discussion on the issue of child sacrifice than his sensationalist photographs manage to do. All his photographs manage to do is promote discussions about him.
I know that I’m mixing the French term for “Cameroon” with the English term for “caterer,” but I kind of feel like a mash up is the best way to describe this pleasant country, which I’ve alternatively heard described as either the best of or the worst of a combination of Nigeria and Congo. Either way, these caterers’ ties were definitely one of the best parts of an event I attended the other day.
Vice has a new documentary out about Liberia. It’s getting lots of buzz around the web, and a few people have emailed me to ask what I think of it. The truth is that I haven’t seen it. Thanks to a very, very, very sloooooow interent connection I can only read what people are saying about it rather than form my own opinion.
So, is this a straightforward case of overprivleged westerners making fun of the poor, a contemptible piece of exoticism? I think the filmmakers see themselves doing something different: showcasing the strange culture collisions that occur in a world as interconnected as ours… Something about the VBS documentaries – the high quality of production, the unfamiliarity of the subject matter, the narrative of “adventure” rather than history – is generating a lot of buzz. As much as I want to object to the VBS video, which sensationalizes, uses historical footage with little context, and is a classic example of parachute psuedo-journalism, I have to admit that it’s a compelling piece of storytelling and that it caught my attention. Rather than critiquing it, I’m interested in picking it apart and starting to understand what makes it work. What could documentary filmmakers learn from VBS to generate a wider audience for their work? Is it possible to broaden your audience without playing to their desire to see something shocking and outrageous? Is it acceptable to use shock and outrage to get people to pay attention to parts of the world they know and care little about?
The field coordinator for the project was friend and colleague Myles Estey. He writes a bit about it on his blog Esteyonage, a frequent link-ee and definitely worth reading, here. Frankly, the Vice guys were lucky to have Myles working on this project. With the caveat again that I haven’t yet seen the film, I’m guessing that the input Myles provided makes Ethan’s questions harder to answer and keep the film from being outright sensationalism.
Myles tells me he’s getting a copy mailed to him in Monrovia and I’m hoping we’ll sit down and watch it in the coming weeks – as the generator flickers and heroine addicts and rebel warlords roam the streets terrorizing Liberia’s tentative peace! Okay, not really. My house is in a nice neighborhood and there’s a tea shop outside where I buy eggs every morning, there are always kids playing, and people bring chairs and benches and gather round in the evenings to watch movies and football games.
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.
When I posted three similar photos of soldiers in DRC a few different people responded that journalists shouldn’t travel in packs. While I generally agree, in a situation like when these photos were taken (probably in the Kivus circa Nov 2008) insecurity was a major issue. Traveling in packs is safer. Additionally, as newspapers and magazines cut costs, few journalists can shell out for their own vehicle and fixer and most will often have to pool resources. This is a reality of the industry, unfortunate as it may be.
The Lens even makes mention of this (the safety part, at least, but not the money part):
“For their safety, all of the photographers work together,” Mr. Leroy said. “In the same situation, the same scene, Dominic is better.”
What makes me upset is that the same types of photos receive praise and accolades again and again. The Lens, which is a great, great blog about photojournalism, has featured two stories from Africa, total. One was about Dominic Nahr, whose image I borrowed for this post. The other was about making a movie about the Bang Bang Club, a group of photographers who covered 1990s apartheid violence in the township in South Africa.
Both are about violence, of course.
UPDATE: Thanks MK for a correction via email. The Lens has also featured Tim Hetherington’s Liberia work (silly omission on my part, since I love his work) and a few images among their daily selections.
So really, my issue isn’t with Nahr at all. Clearly, he’s a great photographer. I guess I’d just like to see what would happen if he turned his lens somewhere else.
Always taking, displaying and praising images of violence or about violence limits the possibilities of the visual vocabulary that describes Africa. For example, photos of soldiers trump Finbarr O’Rielly’s amazing photos of Congolese hair styles. I posted one of his photos among the three images of soldiers, but to me, that’s some of his least interesting work. This great series of Congolese hairstyles by O’Rielly is the truly “new” work coming out of DRC, from a photographer who has worked there on and off for years. They tell a similar story in a very, very different way.
There’s nothing quite as iconic as vulnerable soldiers huddled together, protecting themselves from the rain. And while all three of the fine photographers whose images I’ve posted below obviously have many, many amazing photographs of many varied things, I can’t help but wonder if “new work from DRC,” like the first example is referred to by the Lens, is really that new.
Here are three bits of news gathered from the wide, wide web. I see a relationship among them. Do you?
ONE A recent study commissioned by the American Chamber of Commerce shows how the corporate world views Africa. From Foreign Policy:
The survey suggests that African countries tend to fall into three categories: strong countries that are seriously considered as investment destinations; weak countries that would not even be considered by most of the respondents; and average countries where a mix of good and bad news calls for caution. South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are rated highest for their economic development, while Ghana, South Africa and Tunisia take top honors for their investment climate. South Africa got the highest marks for government attitude, with Ghana, Morocco, Kenya and Nigeria tied in the next highest position. Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt and South Africa saw the highest perceived return on investment. These traditionally high performers are followed by an interesting group of emerging countries that are catching investors’ attention. Libya, Senegal, Mozambique and Rwanda are viewed increasingly positively in government attitude, investment return, and progress with economic development.
TWO People donate things like used underwear, Soviet snow plows, or colored pencils but no paper to Africa. Read about these and more on a great new blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough. (HT: Texas in Africa). Here are five questions to ask before sending a donation:
Is the donation appropriate for the local climate, culture, and religion?
Do they actually need the donation?
Are the goods available locally?
Will the people receiving the goods be able to afford to fix or replace the donated item?
A January 2009 study by the Social Welfare Department – responsible for children’s welfare and supervising orphanages – showed that up to 90 percent of the estimated 4,500 children in orphanages in Ghana are not orphans.
In Ghana a small orphanage might have a budget of up to US$70,000 a year, depending on its size, the bulk of the funds coming from international donors and NGOs, with small contributions from local corporations, according to research by Ghanaian non-profit Child Rights International (CRI).
Donors are attracted to orphanages because they appear to be a simple solution, said Joachim Theis, UNICEF head of child protection for West Africa. “You have a building, you house children in it, it is easy to count them. And they are easy to fundraise for. It is a model that has been used for a long time. But it is the wrong model.”
Monika Schnarre, who considers herself a supermodel/actor/journalist, is about to visit Rwanda. And she’ll blog about it. She’s so edgy. Watch out gorillas!
Most people try to lose weight before a big trip; I decided to take the opposite approach.
I have gained five pounds as a ‘‘cushion,’’ in case I get malaria, yellow fever, or tuberculosis (although people who know me might blame one too many summer BBQs and Mojitos for the extra weight).
Anyway, I feel the less attractive I am the better. God forbid a silverback takes a liking to me, as did that emu in Australia who chased me around a wildlife sanctuary after deciding he wanted to mate with me.
Tomorrow I embark on my journey to Rwanda. I’ve resisted telling many people because their reaction usually ranges from perplexed to aghast. Some 14 years after the genocide of a million Tutsis and the widely publicized poaching of the silverbacks, they may have some cause for concern.
But I’ve been fascinated with primates since I was a kid, and I still have the book that I used to tote around as a child, The Love of Monkeys and Apes by Dan Freeman (1977). With the numbers of gorillas in the wild dwindling (there are only an estimated 700 left) I figured it was time to go before I would lose the chance.
My friend Michael Bancroft will be joining me from Brisbane. Michael’s been teaching about seven spin classes a day to pay for the trip —and, he says, to protect me from any hungry lions. Or maybe an amorous gorilla.
Until this morning, after a tip off from the power-house team at Wronging Rights, I didn’t know who Rankin was. Now, I do. The celebrity photographer had dirtied his leather loafers in the muck of Congo’s refugee camps. He isn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. But I thought I’d take this opportunity to stand on my lion-shaped soap box and ramble a bit about the topic.
“It is crazy that we hear nothing about the Democratic Republic of Congo. The level of suffering there is horrendous, but it hardly makes the news. I heard awful stories of young girls being raped and people fleeing attacks on their villages. Despite the suffering that they have been through the people of Congo are just like us and need our help. I hope the exhibition will wake people up to what is going on.”
The thing is that Ensler and Rankin and the like all say Congo doesn’t get media coverage. While Laurent Nkunda has yet to make his Us Weekly appearance, I would conjecture that he’s one of the most photographed rebel leaders around. Dude is media savvy. And Congo is in the news – if you look for it. Just like if you look for news about Uganda, or anything that isn’t the Beijing Olympics or the US Presidential race. It’s all there if you look past Us Weekly.
All of this brings me in a round-about sort of way to and dude named Renzo Martens. This bit here of Marten’s thoughts on photography in Congo is taken from A Prior:
The NGOs, for example, get barrels of money thanks to the images that photographers generate of mortally sick or malnourished children, money that they use, among other things, to expand their projects… If I ask a local African what he would really like to do professionally, I often get the answer that they want to work for an NGO, because in their country, NGO workers live a rich life in comfortable houses.”
“In fact,” continued Martens, “I find it a very hypocritical situation. Not because journalists and photographers would be just a gang of profiteers exploiting others’ poverty by turning it into attractive or impressive images and making piles of money, but because none of the profits that these images generate return to the people that deliver the raw material: the poor allowing themselves to be filmed. This makes the exploitation of filmed and photographed poverty a perfect double (analogy) for rubber, coltan or slave labour. The economical value of these phenomena is denied to the local population, and consequently, they get hardly anything in return. The poor are never involved in getting anything back from the exploitation of their poverty, they have no ownership over it, they are mostly not even aware of the fact that their willingness to be photographed brings in huge amounts of money for the NGO’s.”
Ehem. Glad you brought to my attention, Renzo, that my work and other photography is similar to having people mine rubber. Most definitely when I take photos like this one I’m actually taking the photo as a precursor to having those cute little kiddies find me a huge chunk of coltan.
And also, to clarify, neither I nor most photographers I know make piles of money.
Recently, I spoke with a guy who was going to do some photography in the Kireka quarry. He wanted advice in general, and specifically he was worried that he’d make the people feel like they were in a zoo and just having their photo taken for sport. I asked him if he thought he was taking their photos for sport. He said, no, of course not. I told him if he didn’t feel like that people wouldn’t see him as that. I told him that if he sat next to people in the dirt, or climbed with them to the edge of the ridge, or looked them in the eye and asked their names, people wouldn’t feel like that.
I’ve never thought much of Renzo Martens other than that he’s a ridiculous provocateur. But today I thought about him. Who is Rankin taking photos for? Himself, or the Congolese people in his images? And ultimately, does it matter?
Rankin will go back to London and tell stories about Oxfam containers and refugees and rape and poverty. He’ll throw in the standard I-was-energized-by-their-hope-and-humility bit. Maybe he’ll get some more people to donate money or learn about Congo who normally wouldn’t. And maybe this will change some things for some people.
But change isn’t about a two week trip and then a press conference. Change is about long term, sustained interest and committment. The photographers at VII have been doing work in Congo for ages. They are looking people in the eye and asking their names. They are coming, leaving, but always coming back. They will outlast Rankin or Martens. They will take images people don’t want to see and provide news some people think doesn’t exist.
I’m glad Rankin has informed a few people. But for how long? And so what? If the people who read about Rankin didn’t previously know Congo was in the news, they’ll forget as soon as Rankin leaves.
Rankin has already left.
I took this photo when I covered Congolese refugees in Uganda in 2007. Just yesterday, I wrote an update for IRIN about the current influx of Congolese refugees in Uganda.
The SIFA African Children’s Choir might need to add some Chicago blues to its repertoire after thieves again struck the traveling group of Ugandan orphans….
The choir has been traveling around the U.S. since April to raise money to build group orphan homes and a school in their tiny village.
The article is a bit of a sob story about how the orphans’ ONLY copies of their dying parents were on the computers that were stolen the firs time around. (Which orphans in Uganda have digital photos? Or if they scanned the photos, where are the originals? And, if you do scan that kind of thing, you back that shit up!)
Orphans, especially robbed orphans, do tend to bring out the best in otherwise not philanthropic businessmen, and one has donated $10,000 and one donated $5,000. Though Chicago tourism may need a boost from both businessmen to recover from this kind of evil.
The article says the kids were there to fund raise – but how much does it cost to buy across-the-globe plane tickets?
Anyway, for a more articulate and less whiny account of orphans choir in Uganda, visit the always lovely and informative Ugandan Insomniac.
KAMPALA (Reuters) – It’s an amateur boxing practice with a difference: neither fighter can see.
In the red corner: Robert Sembooze, 28, blindfolded. In the blue: Bashir Ramadan, 38, who doesn’t need a blindfold because he lost his sight 12 years ago.
The two Ugandans in padded gloves dance like fire flies on the concrete floor of the East Coast Boxing Club and punch each other in the head and chest.
Uganda’s blind boxer, little known even in his home country, does not think being sightless is the handicap some might expect.
“I don’t consider it a big problem,” said Ramadan, who has to tap his way into Kampala’s popular fight club with a stick, as he wiped down after the half-hour punch-up.
KAMPALA (AFP) — His name stirs amazement in coaches, while trainers gush over his skill and competitors quake in fear. Bashir Ramathan is an intimidating boxer — even though he is blind.
Ramathan, 36, lost his sight in 1995 but refused to let that stop him from resuming his boxing career, three years ago.
Peers call him “the German” — a reference to Germany’s tenacity on the football field, mirroring Ramathan’s in the ring.
“I was told by my parents I could do everything,” Ramathan says, as he jumps rope outside of the East Coast Boxing Club, a dusty, concrete facility that opened last year.
In the center of a flyblown gym, where the musk runs strong and the weak are not welcome, Bashir Ramathan bobs and weaves, his tattered gloves punching furiously, trying to find their target. Blows rain down on his arms, his chest, his sweat-beaded face. But his fists keep flying — all completely in the dark.
“You better watch my hook!” he warns. “It’s fast! It’s sharp! Watch out!”
Mr. Ramathan is completely blind, and he is a middleweight boxer. It sounds improbable, and dangerous, but it is his way of dealing with his disability.
This husky, bearded bricklayer from the Ugandan slums is fearless, calling out all the other boxers in the gym to go toe-to-toe with him — as long as they wear a blindfold.
While the news is always on, there is not a constant flow of new events. The level of repetition in the 24-hour news cycle is one of the most striking features one finds in examining a day of news. Google News, for instance, offers consumers access to some 14,000 stories from its front page, yet on this day they were actually accounts of the same 24 news events. On cable, just half of the stories monitored across the 12 hours were new. The concept of news cycle is not really obsolete, and the notion of news 24-7 is something of an exaggeration.
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Monika Schnarre, who considers herself a 
