An interesting point of view about the NGOization of African imagery has been posted by Paul Melcher on the Black Star Rising blog. You can read the full post here.

I don’t entirely agree with him. I think its actually a bit of a cliche that NGO’s only show pictures of despair coming out of Africa.  Actually a lot of what they show is sanitized. The blogger Adam Westbrook got it spot on when he said that what the audience really wants is balance, not a drip diet of misery, or cynical and self congratulatory communications.

‘We want true stories, and we want them as gritty as the real world is. But we also want balance – and we recognise a third-world-cliche when we see it.’

Here’s an excerpt from Paul’s post:

More and more of the documentary photography we see these days comes from NGOs, rather than the editorial press.

Rich people give money to NGOs, which then hire photographers to document their work. And because these organizations operate in the poor, war- and disease-stricken areas of Africa, that is what we see from NGOs. As international photojournalism from the editorial press continues to dwindle, NGO photojournalism may soon be all we see of Africa.

Just imagine what your perception of the United States would be if all you saw were images of 9/11, Katrina, crime-plagued ghettos and nothing else. Would you ever consider coming here for a vacation?

A Perverse Playground

Africa, or at least its despair, has become a perverse playground for too many photojournalists. It’s become a place to earn your merit badge as a documentary photographer. And so we get the same photo essays and multimedia presentations repeated over and over again, to the saturation point.

Interestingly, however, most of these merit-badge projects can only be found online today. Magazines won’t publish them even if they are technically brilliant; the editors, like their readers, are fed up — bored.