Here’s an audio slideshow I photographed and produced for PRI along with radio reporter Bruce Wallace. Make sure you check out the whole PRI package with Bruce’s broadcast piece too.

BBC’s Focus on Africa recently broadcast a debate about Africa’s image. Thanks to @AfricanDigitalArt for including one of my images from As the Days Go By.  for the accompanying slideshow The Many Images of Africa’s Daily Life.

Kate Thomas wrote a piece for Guernica called The House that Doe Built. A must read! And I finally got a chance to use that photo of the crazy stalactites at Doe’s house in Zwedru.

Back in October during Liberian election season, Dan Howden and I visited the Ducor (which every one who reads this blog knows is one of my favorite places ever…) and he recently wrote a dispatch for Roads&Kingdoms that includes a slideshow of some of my Ducor pix.

The Guardian recently ran a photo from my archive from the 2009 Miss Liberia pageant. The current one is causing quite the scandal – make sure you check out Afua Hirsch’s great dispatch, and you can see more images from the 2009 pageant on my site too. 

Earlier today, Charles Taylor was found guilty on 11 counts of planning, aiding and abetting crimes of war in Sierra Leone.

In Brooklyn, I watched on my laptop, awake and jet lagged at 5 am. I streamed the trial and incessantly refreshed Twitter and Facebook, eager to hear updates from Monrovia and Freetown.

In Liberia, just as the verdict was announced, a rainbow-like halo formed around the sun, several friends and colleagues said. Many Liberians interpret this as an sign of the death of an important person.

Taylor might be dead in the water, but for some, the trial is a political farce aimed at making a fool of a beloved leader, while George Bush, Ellen Johnson, and General Butt Naked walk the streets with impunity. For now, things are still calm, it seems.

Afua Hirsch explains in the Guardian,

Ever since Charles Taylor was extradited to the Hague in 2006, there have been two trials going on. One – the criminal inquiry into whether he is guilty of the 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to his involvement in the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. For many, including the thousands of victims in Sierra Leone, the fact of the trial was only an important precursor to establishing his obvious guilt; a fair process to add the stamp of legitimacy to the inevitable outcome. Today, as they watched Taylor be convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes on all counts, they have seen justice done.

The second – the one popularly discussed in Liberia, which has watched its former president become the first African head of state to be convicted for war crimes – is the trial of the system of international criminal justice itself. Here, and perhaps here alone, many people believe Taylor is innocent and his conviction an injustice. The fact that guilt for joint criminal enterprise and command responsibility of the RUF– more serious charges than aiding and abetting – could not be proved against Taylor, for them is only a cursory nod to his general innocence. His trial is the product of an ornate plan designed by the international community to humiliate Liberia and cement its status as a pawn at their mercy. Vox pops by the Liberian press on the streets of Monrovia report views that his trial has been “nothing but a western conspiracy” and that “there has been no tangible evidence provided” in court.

CNN ran some of my photos from Liberia yesterday. When I struggle to explain why many Liberian still love Taylor, their views on international justice, or the complex understanding of the role America has played in their past and recent history, I find myself thinking back to the day I took this last photo of the Atlantic Ocean from the rooftop of the Ducor: a magnificent storm was brewing.

I’m not yet convinced that it has passed.

I’m thrilled to have one of my work featured on Verve Photo: The New Breed of Documentary Photographers. The Ducor was one of my favorite spots in Monrovia and I visited often. To see more of this strange and beautiful place, check out this multimedia piece I worked on with radio reporter Jason Margolis for PRI. 

And, here are some more photos from the Ducor.

Pork shop, Gulu, Uganda. April 14, 2012. Copyright Glenna Gordon.

The always awesome Erica McDonald, the brains behind DEVELOP Tube (an amazing resource of videos about photography that I’ve already spent tons of time watching) put together a selection of images for Time’s LightBox. I’m flattered to be in such amazing company. Take a look! 

Thrilled that two of my photos from Liberia are currently on display in a gallery in LA as part of the International Photography Award’s themed competion One Shot: The City. Big thanks to IPA and everyone else involved in this show.

“I began to attend the weekly Friday night dances at Le Cotonnier with my friends from the village. We drank warm beer and danced all night under the stars. Other than the generator that powers the music, there’s no electricity and no light – a challenge for any photographer! I began to experiment with flash, dancing while I was shooting, and rarely looking through the viewfinder. This was not a “project”: it was my life in the village. Boundaries collapsed: I made photographs as a participant rather than an observer. The element of chance became an integral part of the process since I never knew what images I was going to get.”

David Pace in an interview with Daylight, a documentary photography magazine

There are some photographers whose thoughts and writing on their work I find as compelling as their amazing images. David Pace is one of them. Give his interview a read, and see more of his work on his site here. 

Here’s one of my favorite photos –  a visual palate cleanser.

I was going to call this post “Photo of the Day,” but I realize that no photo can compete with this one today.

Old CID Road, Monrovia, Liberia. November 2011. 

The now infamous photo of the Invisible Children film makers tells several different stories. Though I originally questioned whether or not I’d have wanted the image released if I had an option, I now realize that the release was both inevitable and ultimately effective.

The first and most obvious story that this image tells is that these guys are posing to look cool, which in turn makes them look terrible. This is what most people who see the photo think. That’s certainly what I thought when I took the photo back in 2008, and that’s certainly how it’s being used in the media now for the most part.

But, it also does this other thing — it reinforces Jason, Bobby and Laren’s bad-ass-ness, making them look good even while it undermines their authority. It screams, look how cool we are! Check us out on the Sudan-Congo border!  They are awesome dudes who are taking care of business. This appeals to the many young people who want to be bad-asses and pose like Rambo.

Ultimately though, this is a photograph about privilege: they are outsiders, playing solider, involved in a conflict that they can leave and where others are not playing.

And they know that. In fact, they know that so well that they used that photo as the banner image on their page responding to criticism – trying to re-appropriate it and snuffing out its power by making it their own.

A story told by Jason Russell: Let me start by saying that that photo was a bad idea. We were young and we got caught up in the moment. It was never meant to reflect on the organization. The photo of Bobby, Laren and I with the guns was taken in an LRA camp in DRC during the 2008 Juba Peace Talks. We were there to see Joseph Kony come to the table to sign the Final Peace Agreement. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) was surrounding our camp for protection since Sudan was mediating the peace talks. We wanted to talk to them and film them and get their perspective. And because Bobby, Laren and I are friends and had been doing this for 5 years, we thought it would be funny to bring back to our friends and family a joke photo. You know, “Haha – they have bazookas in their hands but they’re actually fighting for peace.” The ironic thing about this photo is that I HATE guns. I always have. Back in 2008 I wanted this war to end, like we all did, peacefully, through peace talks. But Kony was not interested in that; he kept killing. And we still don’t want war. We don’t want him killed and we don’t want bombs dropped. We want him alive and captured and brought to justice

But, for all of the people who do feel uncomfortable with Invisible Children’s slick message and questionable overtones, there’s a photograph floating around the Internet that confirms those fears. It makes people doubt IC, despite their best efforts to re-appropriate it, to explain it away.

A friend called it “the photo that is the best visual indictment taking down the Invisible Children.” I hadn’t thought of the image as that until she said it. Many photographers hope that our images can change something, that our images can make people doubt their assumptions and reconsider easy answers.

And I realize now that at least this one has.

Copyright Glenna Gordon

UPDATE, March 13: When I wrote this post last week, I had no idea what the scope of this would be. My thoughts changed significantly as this unfolded, and for more on that, please read this later blog post.

Vice wrote a post with a valid question: “Should I donate money to Invisible Children?” and they used my photo without having requested permission. Had they contacted me, I would have been very hesitant.

I explained to Vice:

While I agree that the point of the article is to raise questions — a practice I support — the photograph, even when making that point, continues to perpetuate misinformation and to mythologize the film makers  as bad asses, a practice I do not support. While the photo can be used to criticize them, there are a whole lot of teenagers in Iowa thinking to themselves right now, “Awesome!”

But, here we are, the photo is up and all over the internetz, and Vice has agreed to add a caption for some context, attribution, etc.

My doubts about this photo persist. I have put up other photographs of white people doing different stuff in Africa before. And, at a different moment in my thinking on these things I did share this photo with Wronging Rights.

Recently, though, I’ve hoped to explore the idea of the privilege outsiders are granted with nuance and a soft touch that leaves room for ambiguity. For more on this, please read my post “On bias, subjectivity, and deeply personal photography.”

This photo doesn’t do that — it just contributes to the stereotypes of kids messing stuff up by showing the worst of the worst and showing it without context. And worse yet, it adds to the Invisible Children bad ass mythology even while attempting to cast doubt on their practices.

So, some context:  Sudan-Congo border, April 2008. We’re all bored out of our minds waiting for endlessly stalled peace talks to resume. Invisible Children dudes have some fun by posing with SPLA soldiers. I uncomfortably photograph them having said amount of fun. Later, I worked with a colleague to try and publish a story about what we saw as their questionable practices, but we couldn’t get a publication to bite. Now, perhaps that’d be different, and at the end of the day, I do hope that all of this can make us look at Invisible Children with a more critical stance.