Scarlett Lion » African Stereotypes

Where’s my 26??

Glenna — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:07:11 +0000

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.

Eastern Congo in Pink and Red

Glenna — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:10:46 +0000

These strange and disorienting photos are by Richard Mosse of Eastern Congo. Here’s the New Yorker Photobooth blog’s explanation of his process:

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?

If it looks like a failed state, and is listed as a failed state, it must be… a failed state?

Glenna — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:35:10 +0000

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.

See also: Africa is a Country posting on the same series, and Rob Crilly redeeming Pakistan through meat on a stick, which is my favorite way to for anything to be redeemed.

Why digging up dead bodies and photographing them is a bad idea

Glenna — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:15:41 +0000

Last week, I got an email from Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit asking my opinion of a post he’d written on the ethics involved in a series of photos by Italian photographer Marco Vernaschi of child sacrifice in Uganda supported by the Pulitzer Center.

(Full disclosure: I was the recipent of funding from the Pultizer Center along with Jina Moore in 2009.)

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:

The blogosphere has plenty of opinions and posts about the controversy. See here, or here, or here, or here, or any of a dozen other places, including responses from the Pulitzer Center director Jon Sawyer and the photographer himself.

A quick summary of the controversy: photographer exhumes small girl murdered for sacrificial purposes to take photos of her body, then gives her family money, then clearly changes his story more than once and makes people suspect every “fact” in the situation may not be so “factual.”

First, kudos to Benjamin for bringing all of this to light. Second, I’m glad to see photographers and others who have opinions on something other than photoshop manipulation, which has always seemed beside the point to me.

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.

It takes a village…

Glenna — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:32:51 +0000

I don’t usually give shout outs to charitable causes on my blog, but some things are worth mentioning. HT to Chris Blattman.

Photo of the Day: Caterers Camerounais

Glenna — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:32:27 +0000

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.

Breaking News!! World Press Includes Lots of Awesome Photos from Africa

Glenna — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:56:29 +0000

Okay, I was so excited to see that Malick Sidibé won that I put up a blog post about it instantly. Now, hours later as my internet struggles to keep up with my photo-looking-desires, I realize that there are a couple of great photos from Africa of the total non-poverty porn vien included in the winners this year. Check out Francesco Giusti’s pictures of the sappeurs society in Congo, and Joan Bardeletti’s photo of a picnic on the beach in Mozambique, an aerial shot of JR’s awesome installation in Kiberia, and Denis Rouvre’s images of Senegalese wrestlers. There’s also plenty of standard fare that I won’t spend time linking to here, but, I’m happy to see these four examples mixed in.

Maybe this will be a good year for media in and about Africa. I certainly hope so.

Vice Guide to Liberia

Glenna — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 03:47:18 +0000

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 far, the always interesting Ethan Zuckerman’s take gets to the heart of the matter:

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.

Seeing Africa Differently

Glenna — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:26:27 +0000

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.

for only $5 per month, you can help

Glenna — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:55:10 +0000

From the Onion. For all the people helping.