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.

After Monday’s chaos, Tuesday was eerily calm. Between the boycott and the violence, few ventured out to vote. We’ll see what’s next.

All photos copyright Glenna Gordon/AFP.

Around 1 pm, word spread that shots had been fired at the CDC headquarters in Monrovia. When I arrived, CDC supporters eagerly escorted me upstairs into the room in the main building where a man, shot in the head, was clearly dead. They said others had died too, as many as four or five. Others were injured as well.The phone network went out, and it was hard to tell what was happening.

The strangest part was a stand off between the Liberian riot police and the Nigerian UNMIL unit. The jury is still out on what happened there. It seemed that many people were itching for a fight.

“Tonight, tonight there will be a massacre.” I heard it again and again. Let’s all hope it isn’t true.

All photos copyright Glenna Gordon/AFP.

Six months ago, when Tim Hetherington died, I had just returned to New York from the Liberia-Ivory Coast border. His work, which I thought of often, was with me then as I made the difficult adjustment from humanitarian crisis to Brooklyn life.

Yesterday, when Gaddafi died, I was teaching a photography workshop to a group of Liberians, using Tim’s book as a guide. It was hard to get them to move on to the next activity — they could have easily spent the rest of the day looking at Long Story Bit by Bit. I was reminded, once again, of the importance of his work to both an international audience and Liberians.

On the Lens, Mike Kamber speaks at length about what kind of photographer Tim was and his important legacy.

More than any journalist I know, Tim was conceptual in his work. He thought about the big ideas behind an event, the dynamics, history and driving forces. He then tailored his photography and multimedia work accordingly, trying to dig through and expose these forces. His methods stood in stark contrast to many of us who photograph what fate and others present to us, unwittingly allowing the narrative to be shaped through our acquiescence.

In an astonishingly wide-ranging oeuvre that ran from photo books to articles and film to personal videos, Tim smashed boundaries and enlarged our understanding of what a documentarian and journalist could be.

“I’ve never seen myself as a war photographer,” Tim said in an interview withGlenna Gordon. “This is about narrative. I’m very open to any visual conceits and any possibilities at my disposal to better explain to people the ideas I’m exploring. I like art photography, I like still life, I like war photography. I like to include everything to weave a tapestry to explain to someone, ‘What happened?’”

I’m honored that Mike brought up the thoughts Tim shared with me a couple of years ago, and reminded, once again, of what a loss his death was, not just to his loved ones and his friends around the globe, but also to the world of image making and journalism.

If you’re in New York, make sure you stop by the opening of Tim’s Libya work at the Bronx Documentary Center. 

Volunteers have spent the past five months building the Bronx Documentary Center in Tim Hetherington’s memory. This weekend, his work from Libya will be shown there for the first time. Next week, classes of high school students will visit the gallery to learn about journalism, the Libyan revolution and Tim Hetherington. The BDC is located at 614 Courtlandt Ave. in the Bronx.

Follow @followbdc and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.

The photos I took of Prince Johnson back in 2009 are making the rounds. Back in 2009, I drove over to Duport Road listening to Michael Jackson – he had died that morning – and feeling apprehnsive about entering a warlord’s home alone.

I had nothing to fear, of course, except for being assaulted with self aggrandizing revisionist history. See my interview with him on Foreign Policy here. 

Now, years later, his name in the headlines, I wonder why people are surprised that he’s backing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. She’s got the money, and CDC has publicly said they will implement Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations. That might be an offensive aimed at EJS, but our friend Prince would suffer consequences as well.

His support for EJS is important, but victory for her party is still far from a sure thing.

Below are my favorite photos from the PJ craziness of 2009. The first is of a room in the Capital building where I spent hours and hours waiting. The second is PJ with his pet eagle. I mentioned the eagle to another journalist who went to interview Johnson, and he returned from the interview with news that the eagle has died.

Voting in Liberia’s elections yesterday was calm and organized. I spent most of the day in Bomi County waiting for Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to vote, and then came back to Monrovia in the evening.

EJS stood in line for nearly half an hour before a special line for the “elderly” was created so she could be vast tracked to vote. I hear the Tubman and Weah didn’t wait in line at all.

All photos copyright Glenna Gordon/AFP

I took this portrait of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in August 2009 for the New York Times Magazine. The interviewer, Deborah Solomon, is often hard on her subjects and I worried about future access to the president because of being associated with what could have potentially been a stern piece. I had nothing to fear, as the west continues to embrace Ellen while she struggles at home.