07/17
2012
2012
Monrovia, October 2011
I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
This blog is named after a found object — a plastic lion that was in a crate of discarded items a friend and a few other artists had gathered. I sat on their roof in Nakasero, Kampala back in 2006, sorting through the crate. On that day, I was looking for something. “You are lost!” Ugandas say. But, on that day, I’d found this discarded kid’s toy, made in China on the cheap, that somehow ended up in East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint-chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this place: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
Monrovia, October 2011
There are a lot of articles about surfing in Liberia. But, this one by William Powers, who lived in Liberia during times of war and times of peace, made me ready to be reachin’ back.
I’m thrilled to have my photo of a stormy morning at the beach in Robertsport accompany it.
The next day, an old buddy from “Taylor time” picked me up in his dented Toyota. Harris Johnson, a computer technician in a Yankees cap, grinned as he gunned his car downtown, Monrovia’s fire-scarred skyline looking like something out of Mad Max. We passed over the bridge to Bushrod Island, a hardscrabble industrial section of town, and I spotted the ruins of a pre-war movie theater and remembered the exquisite little groundnut-soup shop that had been tucked behind it. Harris pulled over. Throughout the war, the place had always been half empty, but we found it buzzing with a lunchtime crowd. We were shown to the only seats left and heard from the kitchen the rhythmic sounds of cooks pounding the cassava-yam dough called “dumboy.” A pair of goats bleated from a room to our left as we savored each spoonful of peanut-flavored soup.
Read the whole thing at the Atlantic, and you can see more of my tearsheets here.
Lately, I’ve been more and more interested in portraiture. But, I can never seem to get one photo that I feel captures something about who the subject is. Maybe that’s because I’m not a good enough portrait photographer yet, or maybe it’s because there’s no one person who can be explained in one image.