The thick mahogany doors of the mansion stand ajar as young children run in and out.

A trail of odd junk litters the yard. A small upturned table here, papers there. The walls blackened by fire. A palatial home, ransacked earlier by youths.

The police had been there already, eyewitnesses said – not to stop the theft, but to load up their vehicles with the loot.

An estimated 20 homes belonging to government ministers and their supporters were attacked last weekend in Abidjan.

The mistake these politicians made was to win November’s election, and then to insist that winning a vote meant you get to take over.

The former president did not like that. The new government may be able to shelter under UN protection at a lagoon-side hotel, but their homes, cars and families are fair game for the old government.

This was a part of Africa that did not need handouts to develop, just a few decent politicians.

That’s John James, @ourmaninafrica, in a must read from article that pulls back a little from the day to day violence and gives a bit of narrative and context to what’s happening in Ivory Coast.

In February 2011, more than 40,000 Ivorians refugees fled post election violence and insecurity after two presidential candidates both claimed victory.  Liberians, who had been refugees in Ivory Coast just a couple of years earlier, are hosting many refugees in villages along the border and others are being relocated to camps by UNHCR.

More Ivorians are crossing into Liberia daily as violence intensifies and civil war becomes imminent.

Commissioned by UNHCR. See more photos at www.glennagordon.com.

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.

Photo from West Africa Always Wins

Pauline, a journalist in Abidjan, posted this photo of former president, and current sorta president, Laurent Gbagbo, on state television. “One thing is clear: as long as [state media] controls the airwaves, Gbagbo controls the population,” she says. Gbagbo, who has ruled Ivory Coast for 10 years, and delayed elections umpteen times, just lost the election, but has had himself inaugurated anyway. His oponent, Alassane Ouattara, who won 54 percent of the vote, has also been inaugurated in a parallel ceremony.

This is similar to, though slightly worse than when two celebrities wear the same dress to a party.

For more on this, make sure to follow the BBC’s John James on twitter, check out this analysis of possible short term and long term outcomes of the situation from Reuters, and read all of this bit of analysis from FT (gated, but all you have to do is register to read it):

In effect, this is a coup and should be treated as such. The UN, which helped bankroll the $400m cost of the polls, has refused to accept the outcome. The African Union, regional bloc ECOWAS, France, the US, Britain and the International Monetary Fund have all recognised Mr Ouattara’s victory.

While this exceptional unanimity is to be commended, it is unlikely to be enough. Mr Gbagbo is a stubborn adversary. Events moreover are conforming to his chosen narrative: that Ivory Coast has long been victim of an international conspiracy to rob it of its sovereignty.

Western donor countries are partly reaping what they have sown. A string of dubious elections in Africa has gone unchallenged. Going through the motions may have become a pre-requisite for international acceptance, but it has rarely proved necessary to offer real democracy.

The west would do well to allow African leaders to take the lead; they have every reason to do so and have been strikingly firm in their stance so far. This fiasco carries the risk of fresh conflict and of cementing the country’s de facto partition. This is not only destabilising for neighbouring states, recovering from civil wars, but also a dangerous precedent that could, without care be replicated in other parts of Africa.

These elections are getting far more coverage in the Western media than Burundi’s pretty much widely ignored ballot experiment, or Guinea’s similarly widely ignored ballot. But as Reuters reports, at least Cluff Gold mines in Ivory Coast are still operating! This is also directly related to why anyone is reporting on this election at all. The gold, and the cocoa, that is. Production  and export of cocoa is expected to be delayed.

This may seriously impede Gbabgo’s attempt to have his (chocolate) cake and eat it too.