Last year I visited the studio of Malick Sidibe in Bamako, Mali. One Africa’s most famous photographers, he’s seems like a normal Joe, or since this is Mali, a normal Lamine. I got the sense he just liked having fun and taking pictures without grandiose ambitions to document history or contribute to Africa’s visual culture. Perhaps it is this lack of ambition that makes the achievement all the more meaningful.

Published in this month’s OmVärlden. See this and more of my tearsheets here. 

Buses that were once labeled “A Gift from the Government of India to the People of Liberia,” were re-labeled with signs from the National Tax Administration saying, “Your taxes at work.” Despite the buses, there is a severe lack of public transportation in Monrovia, and outside of the capital it is almost nonexistent.

So many images. So hard to keep track of the things I love, the ones I want to absorb into my vision, the ones from days past I want to remember forever.

Readers, how do you keep track?
 
Tumblr.

 
Pinterest.

 
Above my desk.

I first saw Viviane Sassen’s work last fall as part of a group show MoMA. I didn’t like it. I was annoyed for a reason I couldn’t really articulate. But I kept thinking about it. I see photography that doens’t float my boat everyday, but for the most part it’s forgotten as soon as I click onto the next page. But I didn’t forget Sassen’s work.

I looked at her website a few times, read a few interviews, and at some point, I stopped feeling like I didn’t like the work and I started feeling like I loved the work, like I never wanted to stop looking at it. That I loved how it prevented me from just clicking to the next web page, the next twitter post, my phone ringing, the traffic outside, the cup of coffee getting cold on my desk. I just stopped, and looked.

The kind folks over at Africa is a Country put up a post about some of my Liberia work that was featured on LightBox earlier this week. An anonymous Liberian said in a comment,

Glenna Gordon (the photographer) context in this article is so bias and subjective. Of course, as a non Liberian, you would expect a more objective view, but as a Liberian, we can clearly see who she sides with and with whom she hangs out… We, Liberians need to tell it in our own voices, our way, or else this is all one outsider’s opinion after another.

Of course he’s right. But the point he misses is that I’ve never claimed objectivity. Oppositely — I think of my work as deeply personal and very influenced by my own thoughts, experiences, and relationships in Liberia. While many forms of journalism and story telling are personal, I’m more and more conscious of the role this plays in my own work. The photos I take are the photos I choose to take, and two photographers in the same situation will come back with two very different sets of images for that very reason.

A few weeks ago I had a half-formed idea that I tumblr’ed (since what is Tumblr for if not half formed thoughts?):

I’ve spent the better part of the past three years working as a photographer in Liberia. Writing this with my laptop perched on my knees as the C train rattles along from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I’m sad to be missing the inauguration of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the beginning of the next chapter for Liberia. But I couldn’t be more thrilled to have my work up on Time’s photoblog LightBox. Please stop by and take a look, and see more images from Liberia on my website, and, below, some thoughts on my work and time in Liberia.

“Steal from steal, make God laf.”

A thief who steals from another thief makes God laugh.

Liberia’s civil war ended nearly a decade ago and the country is, at least nominally, peaceful. Some things are getting better for some people.

But after so many years of conflict, no one makes plans for the future.

I first visited Liberia in January 2009, and since then, signs of progress assure donors and investors that their money is well spent. A couple of times a year, the government and businesses put a fresh coat of paint over all the buildings along the main roads. They paint over the mold and the wet, but in the soupy tropical air, the quick coating won’t keep the walls clean.

Freed American slaves came to Liberia in the 1820s. They called themselves the Americos. They wore top hats and hoop skirts despite the hot West African sun. They brought antebellum inequality with them, but this time, they were in charge. The indigenous people of Liberia became second-class citizens in their own country. More than a hundred years of grievances led to a coup and political unrest in the 1980s, followed by a civil war that lasted fourteen years, displaced a third of the country and left 200,000 dead. In a country of just three million people, no one was untouched.

The past will always out; fixing the surface doesn’t fix the problem. In my work, I seek traces of war wounds – psychological and physical – and examine the devices improvised to hide the hurt and embrace the present. I seek out signs of a time before the conflict, where a romanticized past is still visible. I try to understand what it means to live today without thoughts of tomorrow.

Liberia-Ivory Coast border at Buutuo. February 2011. 

I’m starting the new year by looking at old work. The images that catch my eye are different now than they were before. This, I suppose, is photographic growth. Sometimes I wonder what the other side will look like.

A bit late posting about this, but last week at Guernica we featured an interview with Azu Nwagbogu, the founder of the African Artists Foundation, the brains behind LagosPhoto. Thanks to Joe Penney for doing the interview. There’s also a slideshow of some of the great work that was on show in Lagos — please head over and check it out!

See this photo and others in the Foreign Policy photo compilation Once Upon a Time in Mogadishu.