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 It is also a vanity press for my unpublished (and occasionally) published work.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.
", on Because I’m a sucker for Amadou et Mariam videosLife Without Lights from Peter DiCampo on Vimeo.
Peter DiCampo, previously based in Ghana but now heading all over the place, made this great multimedia piece about what happens after the lights go out. Make sure you check out Pete’s other work too here. He was also featured on the Lens blog a bit ago and is now on twitter — @peterdicampo.
If Alexis Okeowo tried to sell me a mixed tape for $100, I’d buy it. Probably for more. Check out this amazing video by Baloji that she linked to yesterday.
The first set of beautiful photos I’d like to point out are by Jessica Hilltout of football in Africa. They’re features on the Lens today, but make sure you also check out her website. I also love her photos on Imperfection, as well as how she documents her style of working. Thanks to Laura from AidWatchers for originally showcasing Jessica’s lovely work.
I love photos that explore ideas and that’s exactly what Carl de Keyzer does in his series “Congo (Belge)” featured on the New Yorker Photo Booth today. The photos are unusual – at times disconcerting and at times engaging, and at most times both. Definitely worth your bandwidth.
I can’t even imagine the kind of formalities that must go into photographing African royalty. When I wanted to take some photos of the police marching band in Monrovia recently, they made me jump through so many hoops that I just gave up. So getting this many kings and their wives and children to agree to sit for portraits is an accomplishment in and of itself. The fact that Daniel Laine’s photos are fantastic is yet another accomplishment. Check out more of them here.
Lola Akinmade emailed me a couple of questions about my work for an interview on the Traveler’s Notebook, part of the Matador Network. Check it out here.
Filed under: things I want for my next birthday. Take note, friends and family, that next year simply writing on my facebook wall will not be enough.
Read more about the golden chukadu on Rachel’s blog.
George Butler is a sketch artist on a six month journey through Central and West Africa. Here’s a bit about what he’s trying to do, from his first post on the London Times Travel Blog:
I can give the viewer more information than he or she would usually get with a photograph.
I’m now looking forward to putting all these skills to the test again in my most exciting and challenging project yet. I am travelling 8,500km overland from London to Libreville, the capital of Gabon in West Africa. It will take about six months and cover 12 African countries.
My brief is to describe West Africa as I find it, something that I believe you can do honestly only with a pen and paper, which allows you to be discerning and understanding, and to record things over time. I plan to draw with pen and ink and watercolour, but with pencils in reserve.
I am carrying 500ml of ink and as much paper as I can; this is due to run out after about two months so, after that, I will draw on whatever I can find, and e-mailing the images to The Times when I can get an internet connection.
I have rarely drawn anywhere in the world where I haven’t been offered a seat, lunch, tea, chai, vodka . . . I am constantly amazed by people’s honesty and generosity and I hope I can recreate this on my African adventure.
I’ve really been enjoying following his journey over the past couple of months. I think he has indeed shown something that photos can’t show. As a writer-turned-photographer-who-still-writes, I feel very conscious of the limitations of each medium. I can hardly draw a stick figure, but as you can see from the images posted below, George can draw a whole lot more than that. Make sure you check out the whole blog, since I had trouble even choosing which images to post.
This is Africa blogger spends more than a blog post amount of time thinking about and exploring Joburg pre-world cup, and then he writes about it. Worth more than a blog post amount of reading. The story is here, and here’s a quick quote:
In Soweto, the arrival of Tumi is equally anticipated. By the time the rapper takes the stage, he’s two hours late — just on time, if you set your clock to Joburg’s rhythms. The crowd, having long since given itself over to the bar, is in a forgiving mood. The air is kinetic.
Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people in the world: those who like Nick Kristof and those who don’t. While I’ve always been clearly in the second camp, hopefully his most recent column will bring more people over to the other side. Africa is a Country does a nice takedown:
Kristof… finds a Congolese child–it plays well with American readers to focus on children, he has argued somewhere else–whose parents cannot afford to pay his school fees but have cheap cellphones and occasionally have a drink.
And then he brings up Bill Easterly’s favorite economist Esther Duflo to endorse his 19th century views in which Westerners, and particularly white Westerners, decide whats good for poor, third world, mostly black, particularly black people, and then he babbles on about microlending. I am tired
Back in college, I didn’t believe in two kinds of anything. I studied art history and valued the ability of an image or piece of art to say two things at once, whether they are contradictory or complimentary. There’s an amazing sounding art exhibit that almost makes me want to say something like, “Get thee to Detroit!” but for now I settle with reading reviews of “Through African Eyes,” which looks at how Africans have pictures westerners for the past couple of centuries. G. P. Zachary blogs at Africa Works with the kind of anecdote that perfectly summarizes how there’s more nuance to the world that Nick Kristof acknowledges:
In my living room, I keep an old colonial, a Congolese carving of what is meant to be a cartoon-like Belgian soldier. The statue is recent, one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of retro-colonial representations that Congolese carvers and artists are producing these days. When faced with the conundrum of why we exoticize the other, and are seemingly condemned to do so, I will visit with my Belgian soldier who is dressed in pith helmet, big black boots and sports a pencil moustache. The old soldier says no words but speaks nonetheless.
Steve Bloomfield’s new book Africa United: How Football Explains Africa is listed by the New York Times as a must read World Cup book. I took the photo they used for the cover of the UK edition when Steve and I worked together a bit in Liberia. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Ernest Bazanye lists things he’s learned from TV all of which are of coure hilarious, but here are a couple of my favorites:
3. The news is more factual, accurate and timely if it is delivered in broken English with a fake accent.
4. I now know what to drink if I want confidence.
6. Most animals do not speak. But those which do are hilarious.
11. Meredith Grey would beat John Dorian in a fair fistfight.
12. White People Can’t Dance
13. White People who can dance are black.
From the always great meowtree posted on Wait… What?
About 3 years after I moved to El Salvador I started my first NGO job. One of my responsibilities was accompanying delegations to see different community projects. In many cases, as soon as we’d arrive to the communities, people would approach me and unleash the litany of their troubles and poverty, sometimes wringing their hands or their hat, asking for help, painting themselves as victims because I was white, had arrived in a 4×4 with an NGO logo on the side and a group of foreigners, and could translate their pleas for help.
I must have seemed pretty heartless, but it was hard to see people prostrating themselves when they lived in similar conditions to the ones my neighbors and I did in the Barrio, and no one in the Barrio saw me as someone who would fix things for them.
It probably seemed to the foreign visitors that a terrible thing had happened to me. I had become “immune to the suffering”. But what I think was really the case is that I didn’t feel sorry for people. I had no illusions that I could solve anyone’s problems.
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.
An image by an artist named Malodi, re-posted from the great blog Solo Kinshasa. If anyone has more information about him, please let me know!
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.
Mo’dernity, Mo’Problems: When I say this is an awesome blog, I’m not at all biased in that judgement by the fact that the blogger is my brother. In fact, I think that gives me all the more license to proclaim his blog crappy, but thankfully I don’t have to because it’s actually incredibly entertaining and insightful. I’m mainly writing this here so that he is shamed into continuing to blog. If you have any doubts about my proclamations, check out some African political science porn, and if that doesn’t get you going, this absolutely will. Even if you’re on ridiculously low bandwidth, I promise that the six hours this video takes to buffer will be worth it.
Long Gone Daddy: Though the Long Gone Daddy is now, well, gone, from Africa at least, he promises a few more posts digesting an amazing traipse across Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Burundi. Plus, I’m always down with bloggers who post embarrassing photos of themselves dancing while dressed like a Republican senate intern. But, really, check out his great story on Kwani? and the Lunatic Express.
Rachel in Goma: Formerly in Kitgum, Rachel is now in Goma, transcribing daily life with a quiet sensitivity and refreshing lack of cynicism, at least for my cynical self. Her epic journey back to the USA for Christmas reminds me of all too many flights that are much too long, and her bit on lake gas and her small boat will make anyone want to buy a Ndege-Samaki.
This is Africa: Once you’ve left Rachel’s uncynical land and are looking for a good dose of mockery and perhaps even some lampooning, head over to Chris’s blog. While things called This is Africa usually make me cringe, I’ll forgive him and pretend it’s called Postcard Junky, since that’s what the URL says anyway. Worth your time because it’s always worth your time read people making fun of bad foreign correspondence or see mercenary travel guides, complete with cupcake car pictures.
Other new blogs (and old favorites) making my RSS happy are Cashew Man, South of West, Holli’s Ramblings, Things Seen and Heard, West Africa Always Wins, Jina Moore’s blog (currently under construction but up soon I hope!), and of course the staples.
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.
Seydou Keïta, via African Media
The best flag ever, from the Benin Empire, via Ryan C. Briggs
Finbarr O’Rielly’s photos are on display in France.
A rare look into North Korea, photos on Time.com
Meet the Simpsons in Angola, via Somewhere in Africa
Devastation in Darfur, visualized by Lynsey Addario
An amazing series of photographers posing for portraits with prints of their most iconic images.
Vivian Sassen, a Dutch photographer who grew up in East Africa, recently published a book of images, via Alexis Okeowo.
Deborah Solomon interviews President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in this week’s New York Times Magazine. I took the photo, which involved carrying a whole lot of equipment up six flights of stairs since the elevator was broken.
The President was very cordial, and amused that a working photographer lives in Monrovia rather than zips in to town to take her picture. I told her how I’d met her in Kigali, in 2007, and she smiled, and thanked me for working in Liberia.
When Chris Blattman was last in Liberia, we talked about blogs. And Kindles and enumerators and a lot of other things too, but also a lot about blogs. He was just about to launch his new site christblattman.com and was looking for a header image.
I pulled out my laptop and started flipping through files of images. I asked him what kind of thing he was looking for. He wasn’t sure, he said.
But, no children.
And, no Africans dancing.
No problem, I said. I have tons of photos of all kinds of things, and since most of his research coincidentally takes place in the two countries where I’ve spent the most time, this would work out nicely. As I scrolled through some thumbnails, he stopped and pointed to one of them and asked to see it full size.
It was of children dancing.
He finally settled on this image, from Karamoja.
Check out his new site for Lenin cakes, development experiments, and a belly proof golden summer.
(If I had been there, nothing could have kept me from taking a picture. Rules about respecting people’s wishes to not be photographed be damned!)
And speaking of going dot com, next week I’ll be launching ScarlettLion.com. Stay tuned for more info. It’s been fun a fun lion sex filled run, blogspot, but it’s time for me to go dot com.
It’s not often that Liberia is in the news, but this week, it is. Here’s a best of:
Former warlord and current Liberian Senator Prince Johnson. Copyright Glenna Gordon/AFP
