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.”

Interesting visualization by Stefan Einarsson on We Can End Poverty. I’m of two minds here — one that this is crazy creative and different than what we’re used to seeing, and the other that this communicates complete dependence on world leaders and passivity on the part of Africans. What do you think??

Yesterday, Ciara Leeming over at Duckrabbit linked to an audio slideshow in the Guardian about male rape that accompanies a long written feature ont he same topic. It focuses on Congolese refugees in Uganda who were raped – some in DRC and others in Uganda. The audio includes many gruesome details, a practice all too common in journalism about rape, but I do think that photographer and writer Will Storr avoids sensationalizing the stories these men have shared with him. I felt uncomfortable watching the piece — which is certainly the point. Storr doesn’t leave us with any hopeful narratives or mutterings about how strong the Congolese are. Instead, there are just these men and their families and their tenuous futures.

Yet, the written piece begins,

Of all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour.

While female rape in Congo is widely covered, it is sensationalism to call rape against men a secret. The New York Times reported on this in 2009, it’s mentioned in the Mapping report, and elsewhere.

Several photo essays of the conflict and aftermath of the post-election violence in Ivory Coast are worth seeing. While the conflict received some (but not much) coverage from the mainstream media, the aftermath is already off the radar as some celebrate a supposedly successful intervention, and the results of atrocities committed by both sides are swept under the rug.

Chris de Bode’s story When Guns Fall Silent via Panos focuses on the aftermath in Western Ivory Coast. The first photo, of the crowded Catholic mission at Duekoue, shows the scale of the displacement, while many of his other photos show the individual impact.

Jane Hahn was on assignment for the New York Times during the conflict. She’s interviewed by the Lens blog here about the challenges of working in Abidjan and being one of the few foreign correspondent covering the conflict. Many of the images on her site show the gory reality of conflict, others show the intensity of political allegiances.

Peter di Campo went to Ivory Coast for the Pulitzer Center. He did a series of portraits that don’t reveal individuals’ identities, as well as images that document the severity of need for medical attention.

Stefano di Luigi’s photos on VII show a clear narrative of conflict, aggression, and a victor’s assent. John Ediwn Mason wrote a great post awhile back about di Luigi’s work and satire that’s worth reading, though I think the straightforward nature of this series keeps the photographer from lapsing into unnecessary visual cliche.

Pete Muller is a photojournalist based in Juba, South Sudan. I want to point out two series he’s done recently. The first is a series of portraits of Dinka cattle raiders.

On Time’s photography blog Lightbox, Pete writes:

The men pictured in this series are members of the Dinka Rek sub-tribe and self-identify as a “brigade.” In this exceptionally remote area of southern Sudan, there are no signs of the region’s soon-to-be-independent government. No army. No police. No civil servants. In this void, communities are wholly responsible for their own security in an environment of extreme risk and hostility. The ubiquitous presence of weapons creates a deadly and delicate power balance between the competing pastoralist groups. If the government moves to disarm one sub-tribe, they will face immediate threat of raiding from neighboring groups that retain their weapons.

In addition to be technically superb photographs, what I really like about these images is the individuality and identity that each of the subjects has. And by viewing a series of portraits, I get a sense of a textured community of discrete individuals, rather than a sort of pre-historic and stereotypical horde of angry men with guns and cows. It’s difficult to make the same sort of sweeping statements all too common in media coverage when you as a viewer are offered the chance straight into the eyes of a young woman or check out a dude’s awesome aqua and pink shirt. These images aren’t of a “tribe,” but of specific people with specific personalities who make specific choices.

Pete uses a similar method in a series of portraits of women in DRC all of whom were among “the nearly 50 women who described their brutalization and rape by a unit of Congolese soldiers who attacked Fizi, D.R.C. on Jan. 1, 2011.”

On Lightbox, Pete explains:

“Once we had established the condition of relative anonymity for the women, dozens of rape survivors were eager to pose for portraits. They moved quietly to the center of the room and waited patiently for me to work. In many instances, I was required to use my hands to make minor adjustments to their stance and location. Their faces were already covered and, given the horrible experiences they’d so recently endured at the hands of men, I felt overwhelming pressure to guide them as delicately as possible. I moved them gently by their shoulders and spoke softly in KiSwahili, a common language in eastern Congo. I felt the weight of crimes committed by fellow men and, in those moments, felt ashamed to be part of the group.”

There are many photos of women in DRC who have been raped, and many that hide the subject’s identity. But by creating a series of similarly staged portraits, Pete brings a sense of individuality to each of the women shown. I’m drawn to the bright vertical stripes the first woman wears, the slack arms of the second woman, the tender moments between mother and child. These images give evidence of the scope of the problem in a way that a one-off photograph or a more straightforward narrative  photo essay on DRC does not demonstrate.

Thanks to Pete for letting me post so many of his images.

Brendan Bannon and Mike Pflanz are the Nairobi based journalists behind Daily Dispatches, a month long documentary project that explores the ins and outs of Nairobi - a city known to some for its crime and poverty, to others for its art scene and tech bubble. This in-depth project does an amazing job contextualizing all the different ways an urban hub like Nairobi works and doesn’t work. Spend some time exploring the archives and follow along for the last couple of days. Projects like this one, with such amazing breadth and commitment, can really contribute to a more nuanced understanding of places usually only shown from one particular angle.

For western eyes, Sudan has most often appeared as a site of famine or war, be it in the south or Darfur. Said to be “one of the hollow-bellied places of the world” or a landscape “seared by war,” the continent’s largest country has often been rendered via stereotypical images.

The politics of the situation facing Sudan is inevitably complex (the International Crisis Group has excellent analyses of the situation here and Alex de Waal has his usual profound insights here). So how can it be visualized? How can politics be represented in pictures?

This week we have seen two conventional strategies in response to that challenge. The first is to invoke images from the past…

The second is to record the appearance of the visible traces of politics, namely leaders engaged in ceremonies where the trappings of sovereignty are evident. Peter Martell’s pictures of President Omar al-Bashir’s visit to the south earlier this week are an example of this, showing Bashir’s welcome by the south’s leader Salva Kiir, with the requisite red carpet, military officials and marching band.

It is a lot to ask of a single photograph that it represent the complexities of politics, no matter how talented the photographer. No doubt in the week ahead we will see pictures of polling stations, queues of voters, and people raising inky fingers to signify the completion of their electoral act (hopefully images of conflict will be absent). Who, though, will produce something a little different?

This is what David Campell has to say about the visual representations of the referendum in Sudan. The last paragraph is especially poignant and I think it’s important to try and imagine what a photograph that captured these complexities would look like. A group of South Sudanese in heated debate, perhaps with political posters on a wall behind them framing their engaged expressions? A voter leaving a polling station with a look of dismay, confusion, or trepidation on his or her face, rather than the stock happy voter images we’re seeing over and over?  I’m not that either of these theoretical images, or any image for that matter, might do the trick. Perhaps this isn’t the kind of complexity that can be captured through spot news photography.

In Ivory Coast, an equally complicated political situation is being widely photographed. In yesterday’s New York Times, a story about civilians paying the price for political tumult is accompanied by two photographs by different photographers of dead bodies.

The question is what each photograph tells us about the politics of the situation, and the answer, I fear, is very little.

I strongly believe this has far more to do with the demands of newspaper photography and news imagery than any shortcoming on the part of the photographers. Both snappers are well established image makers who have worked in West Africa for many years, and whose work I very much respect.  They both undoubtedly know far more about the politics involved than either of these images lets on.

In an interview, Stephen Mayes, managing director of VII, says:

Rather than looking at oneself, and at one’s own experience, what photojournalism has become is the process of looking at others in a way that is intrinsically remote and idealized. Representations of war, for instance, fall into standardized forms. There are certain [visual] codes that recur. What I tend to find is that so much journalism we see is about affirming what we already know, instead of challenging us to broaden our horizons.

The photographs coming out of Sudan and Ivory Coast at the moment mainly reflect instances of these known visual codes. This is partially because they are all news photographs, which are constrained by factors like time, budget, and logistics, and partially it’s because this is what newspapers think that readers want. They are documents of the situation, verification of what’s happening and when, rather than explanations or commentary.

The numbers of comments on Chris Blattman or Jina Moore’s blog that delve into the details and nuances of just what is going on in Ivory Coast clearly point to the fact that not all readers want simple narratives, and I would argue this could extend to a desire for photographs that are more than known visual codes as well.

Readers, what do you think? Do these types of photos do the trick when it comes to illustrating what’s going on? Or do you want to see something else? Also, can anyone point to examples of images that illustrate politics, in Africa or elsewhere, more effectively than these do?

Here’s one of my favorite images by Ami Vitale of a rally in Kashmir that manages to be both political and metaphorical, and through its use of metaphor demands that I as a viewer challenge my assumptions and seek to learn more about what’s happening.

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.

I think the stereotyping of Africa as “a dark continent” through photography is gradually changing. We still have a long way to go. It is good to see that the new generation of photographers who throng Africa are generally more sensitive than was the case.

Another point worthy of note is that there are quite a number of African photographers now who can tell their own stories. We didn’t get here in a day, so let’s give ourselves sometime to see the perception of Africa properly balance.

That’s Nana Kofi, a great Ghanaian photographer, chiming on a post I put up a couple weeks ago, Just how stereotypical are images of Africa?

There are 20 well thought out comments on that post — and that’s amazing. It’s amazing to me that so many smart people are invested in this debate. Perhaps that’s the strongest indicator we’ve got that things are indeed changing. Go over there and check out the debate!

Very little has been said about this week’s New York Times Magazine story about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in the blog world because frankly, there’s very little worth saying. Journalist Daniel Bergner takes twelve paragraphs to even hint at the fact that many Liberians are unhappy with EJS, though he doesn’t bother talking to any Liberians who are not the president or running for presidency. He mentions candidate Prince Johnson, but doesn’t mention that his candidacy isn’t the real threat and that George Weah’s is, especially with the backing of many of Charles Taylor’s people, who are still much more popular than EJS ever was or will be.

And for the record: many many many Liberians don’t like EJS and are unhappy with her. The electrical grid is not being rebuilt (though the article says that it is), corrupt ministers are shuffled from one ministry to another, and the police are paid so little and infrequently that extortion is the norm, not the exception.

Though the international community is rewriting the African-leader-hagiography with EJS as the newest star now that Museveni Kagame is falling out of favor, that doesn’t mean that her candidacy is a sure thing. She’s still, despite these things, Liberia’s best option, but that no one is doing her, Liberia, or African leaders in general any favors by creating such over simplified political narratives. Acknowledging her weaknesses as a candidate and leader and then endorsing her anyway is a much stronger position to take than pretending she has no weaknesses.

One last very serious qualm with this article:

Because of her early and enthusiastic backing for Taylor, the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, charged with helping the nation to heal, recommended last year that she be barred from public office for 30 years. The proposal, which holds no legal power, seems to be viewed by Liberians and Westerners, and by Sirleaf herself, as almost precious.

Besides the fact that Bergner didn’t bother, you know, talking to any Liberians besides EJS about the TRC, he also doesn’t for a second consider that perhaps EJS has a reason to discount the report and that’s why she thinks its “precious.” The TRC report had many problems, but discounting it and any chance for a truth commission is not just throwing out the baby with the bath water, it’s also allowing for widespread impunity.

Bergner also wrote a book about Sierra Leone. Here’s the description of it from his website:

in sierra leone, rampaging soldiers have made a custom of hacking off the hands of their victims, then letting them live as the ultimate emblem of terror. the country is so desperate that, forty years after independence, its people long to be recolonized.  in this book, the acclaimed author follows a set of western would-be saviors and a set of sierra leoneans, who take us into a land of beauty, horror,
resilience and redemption. from mercenaries to missionaries, child soldiers to priests who can deflect bullets and cure AIDS, bergner tells this racially charged story with sensitivity and precision, creating an unforgettable work of literary reportage.

‘Nuff said.

For a great article about what reconciliation might actually mean to Liberia, with much more nuanced political commentary, read Johnny Steingberg’s great article.