Carla Williams is an artist, a writer, and a professor of photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She also edits the Society of Photographic Education’s journal Exposure.

ENG: You’ve written a lot about race and photography, and that’s something I’m really interested in. Could you talk a bit about what you see as happening right now in photography regarding intercultural representation, diversity, and race?

CW: At this point in my career, I feel like a lot of my work—particularly my work with Exposure as an editor, and as a blogger—it’s sort of like a numbers game. I’ve intentionally taken on the role of someone who is obsessed with chronicling the artists who just keep getting left out of the broader discussion.

En Foco, led by Miriam Romals, and Dodge and Burn, by Qiana Mestrich–what they all do really inspires me.

There’s this segregation that happens—and I think it’s a necessary one—where you have organizations like En Foco who are particularly focused on any artist of color. African American, Middle Eastern, Asian, Latino—sort of “everybody else.” And my blog does the same—because it focuses on primarily African Diaspora artists. But when I took over Exposure, I was determined to see that every issue got balanced.

I’ve worked in this field for over 20 years and diversity is just dwindling. My partner Deirdre even called me yesterday and said, “I’m in MOMA and I’m looking at these books, ‘50 photographers you should know,’ and guess how many are women? 8. And guess how many are people of color? 2!” You know? The numbers were…startling.

It’s like, Really?! Who could consciously publish that in this day and age? Who could look at the entire field of photography and think this made sense? It’s just unbelievable to me that A) the author could conceive of it and B) the publisher could think, Yeah. Good.

So in a sense, my scholarship is less scholarship than it is archival work; making sure that I keep counting, keep taking stock of people whose work already exists.

I had a conversation with Fazal [Sheikh] about the problems of things that are solely focused on or determined by race, or gender, or that kind of thing, [and there are problems]. The mainstream discussions about art and photography will claim that we have gotten past that, but I think we’ve done exactly the opposite. We’ve gone past the discussion of race and not actually integrated that broader approach into our to thinking about art.

I think it’s become a much smaller field than I imagined it was when I entered it. And the possibilities just seem so much narrower now than almost 30 years ago, when I decided to major in photography. If I were a student now, I wonder, is that a field I would choose?

ENG: Why is it important to move away from this homogeneity?

CW: Well, it’s important for me because I am a woman of color, and I want to imagine myself in this field. I want to imagine myself as part of its history, as part of its present—as part of it. And so unless there are other people like me, I can’t imagine my own place.

And if I’m there, then I want everybody else there too. I mean, not to sound Pollyanna-ish or anything, but it’s really crucial. I can’t imagine being part of this discussion if I can’t turn to anyone and engage them with these same ideas about pictures, and what they mean, and how they operate.

So on a personal level it’s really important to me. And on a professional level, photography is such a huge medium. One of the things I’ve always loved about it is that it’s so accessible, compared to any other art medium. It functions in so many ways beyond just art. It is journalism. It is science. It is all these things. And the idea that you would continue to promote it as simply one narrow thing is just bizarre.  I can’t imagine why anybody would be invested in that, because there’s so much more to explore about it. There are so many different layers of thinking about it and approaching it.

ENG: And why is diversity decreasing in the field?

CW: I think a lot of it is market-driven. The way in which photography has gotten inflated in the last 20 years, and the way in which photographs have gotten so much bigger in order to enter into that art-collector’s marketplace—I think all of that plays a role.

And I think the way in which dealers market artists to collectors (and by extension, to museums) has really narrowed the way in which the market values particular kinds of work.

ENG: Yeah, I’ve noticed that. The art that’s in museums and being sold in the high-end galleries is often really different from art that is shown locally, in communities, as a way to bring people together. Can you explain a bit more about that?

CW: I always point to the Becher school—the photographers that studied with the Bechers at Dusseldorf Academy. The way in which all of that work hit the photo scene and particularly the marketplace created a shift away from work that was typically concerned with issues of representation, cultural issues. And a shift away from work which was more on the scale of traditional photo printing.

It’s work that reintroduced a particular modenist aesthetic in this postmodnernism. And it was work that shifted its scale to communicate more with painting and the traditional museum-based arts.

The market for photographs didn’t really exist before the 1970’s, and by the 1990’s it had really shifted. At that point photography entered the market with more aggressively editioned work, larger work, and work that operated more like painting and sculpture and those more traditional western art forms.

And so the work that I think of as “photography” as opposed to “art” is much more photo-scaled, it’s more community-based, and it’s attempting to operate at levels other than the collector’s marketplace.

I think now there is a lot of photography that just operates as “art.” And many of the artists who make it aren’t photographers, per se. They’re artists who work with photography. I come out of a tradition of people for whom the medium is really photography; people for whom It’s as much about the medium itself as it’s about the ideas and the subject in the work.

So there’s this split that happened. And I think it’s perfectly fine that it happened, but there’s not a tremendous amount of acknowledgement that both approaches remained vital. Because I think the tendency is to assume that the mold that dominates is the correct one.

And when you have photographic prints that start at $20,000-$50,000—there are not a lot of people who are going to sell at those numbers. The market just won’t support that. So you have this much more rarified realm of collecting.

I’m not really interested in art so much as I am in photography. That’s one of the reasons why I was particularly interested to work at RIT because it’s a school that has a photo program. It’s not a fine art program into which photography enters. It’s a photography program, of which fine art is a component. Although I am “fine art faculty,” one of the things that was really important to me was that it’s a school that has advertising, photojournalism and biomedical photography—all of that is within our college.

And to me, that’s what’s so great about photography—it has all these different kinds of applications, and fine art’s just one little part of that.

ENG: Tell me about some of the major issues you see going on in journalistic photography right now.

CW: It’s a shame if professionals get ousted by amateurs because you become a professional for a reason—there’s more to it than just picking up the camera.

But at the same time, it’s really dependent upon what your audience knows and expects and if your audience is increasingly savvy about its own ability to produce images, I think that really does shift the role that the professional photographer plays in the presentation of imagery, and in the presentation of information through images.

I find that in teaching, I’m more drawn to discussions about journalism than about fine arts because, in this moment, it’s more interesting. We’re facing this real shift in the way we conventionalize photographs in journalism.

Whereas in fine arts, anything goes. You can really make anything and it’s fine. People make daguerreotypes and digital prints, and you can attach an aesthetic and significance to all those choices. But in journalism those questions like, “What are you doing? and why are you doing it?” seem much more vital and necessary to ask.

I think we still do a fairly poor job of paying attention when people represent themselves. People travel more and we have a global economy, so people are coming into greater contact with other cultures, but we still have difficulty understanding the difference between being represented and representing yourself.

And those debates are tough. And it’s not to say that people who represent others can’t do a really terrific job of capturing the complexities and losses of a particular group. But I think, as a whole, that particular debate has overshadowed the necessity of people representing themselves.

One of the blogs that I have is about black photographers and publishing. Basically what I do is collect any book, anything that could be called a book, any publication by or about black photographers, and to a lesser degree (because of my budget), books about black subjects.

The reasons I do it are multifold, but one of them is that I want to make the books accessible. I want to create a small, circulating library.

And one of the challenges of that is I end up buying a lot of books whose images don’t interest me at all. In fact, the vast majority of the actual images I’m not interested in. But I’m really interested in who has made them and why, and why those get published and not others. And also, again, that counting thing. I’m counting everything that has been published, because so far the numbers are so small, in relation to the number of photobooks that have been published in total since 1844 when the Pencil of Nature was published.

And so what I have learned is that I can’t even consider the pictures in the way I would normally consider a photograph because that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that act of representation. And, in that instance, the act of reproduction in print form, and what that means. And then the pictures themselves are sort of secondary.

And that’s a weird thing to reconcile. But until the discussion is more broad across the spectrum of photographs and photography, I think it’s important.

It’s so much a part of our world, our innate curiosity about people. We like to look at pictures of them! We like to take them and we like to look at them. It’s what we do as human beings that have this tool—the camera. it’s just so much a part of understanding the world that we have to negotiate with it. We have to figure it out.

Related posts:

1. The copyright question
2. PAY UP! Photographers and NGO’s and $$
3. Distribution–who’s responsible?

How does a photograph get from a shoebox under the bed to the walls of an exhibition space? It takes a certain kind of vision, some good proposal-writing skills, a team of Nubian youth, and a lot of determination.

Greg Constantine came to photography when he was 34. He spent the first part of his career in the music business. Then he packed up house, moved to Asia, and started making pictures. These days, he’s involved in a multifaceted, multi-year, international project on statelessness called Nowhere People, done in part through collaborating with UNHCR, and using film (as in celluloid, not movies). I first learned about him last year, when he submitted a photo essay to PhotoPhilanthropy, in collaboration with Medecins sans Frontieres.

His work documents the struggles of ethnic groups around the world who have been denied or stripped of citizenship.

One portfolio within this project focuses on the Nubians in Kenya. I knew nothing about the Nubian community, so Greg gave me a brief history lesson (you can read more on the project website) and then helped me understand the various components of his Nubian project.

Basically, the Nubian community was incorporated into the British Army in the 1880s and brought from Sudan to Kenya in the late at the turn of the century. They fought for the British in the King’s Africa Rifles during WWI and WWII and played an important role in the development of Kenya and East Africa. Since Kenya’s independence, the Nubian community in Kenya has historically been unrecognized as a tribe of Kenya. Even though they’ve lived in Kenya for over 100 years, it wasn’t until the 2009 census that ‘Nubian’ was acknowledged as a tribe living in Kenya.

Unable return to Sudan, the Nubian community was given 4,197 acres of land by the British in 1912 to settle on. They named the land Kibra, or ‘land of forest.’ After askaris were demobilized, they used this land to farm and earn a living from. But after independence, the Nubian claims to title deed have been denied by successive governments. As hundreds of thousands of rural migrants flooded into Nairobi to find work, Kibra has been the place they were encouraged to settle. The small Nubian village of Kibra (whose population was 3000 in 1950) turned into Kibera (which is now home to around 1 million people, according to the BBC in 2009).

In late 2008, the UNHCR provided Greg with funding to spend a month photographing and documenting the Nubian community who live in the Kibera slum.

“During that month,” he told me, “I would sit with families in their homes in Kibera for an hour or two, talking. And by the end of our conversation, they would have pulled out these amazing, old photographs from shoeboxes that they had never shown anybody outside of their own family. This documentation of the Nubian community was something that nobody had ever seen before. So the pieces of this project were already all there.

“The challenge for me was finding the funding to take all these pieces of the project and put them in one central location that could then be presented to the public in a variety of ways. And, importantly, I also wanted to be able to juxtapose these really old photographs that depicted the community’s situation in the past with my own documentation of the community now.

“Once I got the OSI grant in the beginning of the year, I worked with a team of six Nubian youth in Kibera who went from Nubian household to Nubian household, asking people to loan us these old photographs. I had been hoping to find about 100 photographs. But during the one month of the project, they found about 250 photographs that date back as far as 1912.”

Then the photographs were taken to a lab in Nairobi and scanned at high resolution and put onto a DVD, which the team sent to Greg at home in Southeast Asia. “They were incredible,” he said. “I went through and edited and touched up the images a little bit—minor dust spots and things like that. And I made a selection from those images to reprint and include in this exhibition.”

In addition to the traditional exhibition he’s having at a gallery in Nairobi, which will travel to London next, Greg wanted to be able to deliver the project locally to the Nubian community in Kibera. (As well as the non-Nubian communities in Kibera.)

“Part of the motivation for doing the project was to elevate the awareness of the Nubian community amidst the broader society. Most people here in Kenya have no knowledge of the Nubians, and their contributions to Kenyan society, and the development of East Africa.”

Through utilizing these old photographs that families loaned the team, the project has incorporated the Nubians into the storytelling process in an innovative way. The project is designed to help them actively dismantle some of the stereotypes about them.

Greg also approached LiveBooks, in the US, and they agreed to donate a pre-designed website to the project, so that other people can see all the photographs, (since the exhibition included only 1/5^th of the archival images). Those images have also been placed onto PhotoShelter, so that the Nubian community can access them and use them.

“I really embrace multimedia and online and new technologies,” says Greg, “But I also find that there are so many multimedia projects which consist of the photographer talking about their work. And I really wanted the Nubians to tell their story, and not for me to tell the Nubians’ story for them. And so the multimedia project we did only has Nubians talking, and it incorporates a lot of the photographs.”

He also printed a condensed version of the gallery exhibition onto huge sheets of white vinyl, which were displayed last week at the Kibra Secondary School in the Kibera slum.

Greg said that the Kibera exhibition, and the community engagement that went along with it, has been the most rewarding part of the project for him.

“It exceeded all expectations,” he told me. “We estimate that in the 2 1/2 days, some 2,300 people visited the installation. People couldn’t stop touching the photographs and pointing out relatives and ancestors in the photos that are no longer with us today. Parents were able to show their children who their great grandparents where and so forth.  I think the youth walked away with a renewed sense of pride in their community and also a renewed sense of motivation and responsibility to take what past generations have done for the community and move it forward to the next.

“It was an incredibly rewarding and amazing opportunity and one that I’m determined to duplicate for other stateless groups in my Nowhere People project.”

Meanwhile, the political struggle continues. The Nubians are still denied title rights to land and are still not fully recognized as citizens of Kenya.

Related posts:

1. Fazal Sheikh: fear, vulnerability and openness
2. Showcase: Exiled by weather
3. Statelessness

‘Our cover image this week is powerful, shocking and disturbing. It is a portrait of Aisha, a shy 18-year-old Afghan woman who was sentenced by a Taliban commander to have her nose and ears cut off for fleeing her abusive in-laws. Aisha posed for the picture and says she wants the world to see the effect a Taliban resurgence would have on the women of Afghanistan, many of whom have flourished in the past few years. Her picture is accompanied by a powerful story by our own Aryn Baker on how Afghan women have embraced the freedoms that have come from the defeat of the Taliban — and how they fear a Taliban revival.’

The problem is that this editorial reads as if Aisha’s ears and nose were cut off before the American/UK invasion and therefore is a justification for the war.  Infact the barbaric act took place last year. Despite this the cover states that the girl’s face is representative of ‘What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan’.  But this is what is happening in Afghanistan now, after all the billions we’ve spent bombing the place. Some might say it’s dirty propaganda.

Much of my work in Ethiopia was related to women’s rights and the record in that country is as bad, if not worse than Afghanistan. Strangely the US and the UK take a different approach to Ethiopia. Instead of bombing the country every year they donate a couple of hundred million dollars in aid. It’s not always money well spent, but it sure beats bombing people as a way of changing barbaric cultural practices.

TIME’S editorial certainly makes for a great t-shirt ‘Bomb Afghanistan for women’s rights’, but I can’t see many behavioral change experts recommending it as a way to stop women being raped, mutilated or forced into early marriage.

Infact if you took all the billions we’ve spent on bombing Afghanistan and offered the money as payments to not abuse women’s rights (the aid way) then I’m pretty sure you would see change happening a lot swifter. The only problem is all those in the US and UK who profit from war would be a hell of a lot poorer and in this world their right to make money is the most important right of all.

I feel sorry for Bieber, she’s done a great job and cannot be faulted, but I feel this photo has been misused.

Related posts:

1. Ed Kashi reports from scene of Lahore bombing
2. Behind The Veil
3. Soldier and Son

‘I’ve avoided the temptation to say that, in the United States, poverty is white. It’s true, however, that there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks. While a larger percentage of the African-American population lives in poverty, the sheer number of poor whites — 24.1 million — overwhelms the number of poor blacks — 12.1 million. (Interestingly, there are also more poor Hispanics than there are poor blacks — 14.5 million.)

Nevertheless, Americans insist on associating poverty with blackness. According to the influential study by Gilens that I mentioned above, the fact that blacks “dominate public images of poverty” is the result of “network TV news and weekly news magazines [that] portray the poor as substantially more black than is real the case.” This needs to change, and photography can play a role.’

Read the full article by John Edwin Mason here.

Related posts:

1. Rediscovering Poor Whites in South Africa: Deja Vu (All Over Again)
2. Perspectives of Poverty
3. Poverty Poem, by Fred Taban

Once again, there are a lot of different answers to these questions, and they depend a lot on the specifics of the organization in question. Sometimes foundations are responsible for supporting organizations effectively. A grant will make a bigger impact if it isn’t just for a set of photographs, but also for the other elements of an effective advertising or awareness campaign. Sometimes it’s up to the organization to solicit pro bono contributions from professionals with the relevant skill sets. And sometimes it might be up to an individual–perhaps the photographer!–to put in place the other elements of a successful project so that their personal contribution is meaningful.

I had a great conversation this week with Burk Jackson, who has just started an organization called Creative Cares in Portland, OR, that deals with this very issue.

The idea is to create twin databases of people with skills to donate (photographers, videographers or video editors, graphic designers, web designers/developers, writers, art directors, public relations specialists, or project managers) and organizations with projects they need staffed. If you’re a “creative” you fill out this form. If you’re an organization, you apply here. Then Creative Cares matches up people and projects.

To me, this seems like a great system. PhotoPhilanthropy has been thinking through how to go about this as well. We’d love to hear your thoughts about what the best way to do this might be. (Or what’s wrong with other systems you’ve tried.)

Burk is a commercial photographer who took some time off last summer to spend with his kids, and ended up injuring his back and taking five months off. He got to thinking about what really motivated him, and the changes he wanted to make professionally.

He had done a little bit of work photographing for nonprofits, and he found it really exciting and satisfying. “The most amazing stories are out there,” he told me. “But the best work in the world is going unnoticed because no one is telling the story.”

Meanwhile, other people just weren’t sure how to get started. “I run into creatives and they want to give back, but they don’t know how,” Burk told me.

He also heard stories of photographers who had worked with nonprofits, but not seen any real gains come out of it. Some people had taken on long-term projects, only to have the staff suddenly turnover at the organization they worked with. New staff either threw away the images, didn’t know they were there, or didn’t see a way to use them. The photographers were discouraged.

Burk recognizes the importance of accountability on the part of a photographer—if you’ve solicited contributions for a photo project, you need to report on your progress to your donors. Burk recently raised $5,200 from friends and family to do a pro-bono project for a small nonprofit organization in Tanzania. He sent his supporters updates and photos, to let them know how he was spending their money. But the same is true of nonprofits as well. “There needs to be some accountability on the NGO side,” says Burk. “I thought there had to be a better way for creatives to connect with nonprofits and find funding,” while also being able to hold nonprofits accountable for doing something with the donations they (creatives) made.

Part of the reason images sometimes fall through the cracks is that organizations don’t have the rest of the marketing resources they need to use the pictures. You need to have strategists, writers, graphic designers—it takes a lot more to make an awareness campaign than a single photograph.

So who is filling this gap? Are there organizations out there, in addition to Creative Cares, providing this kind of marketing support or consulting to nonprofits? I’ve done a little research, and what follows is a list of leads (for individuals, for organizations, and even one for grantmakers). Please add more via the comments section, or email me with suggestions at eliza@photophilanthropy.org. (I especially need help with international resources—this list is heavily lopsided toward the U.S.)

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY AND COMMUNICATIONS

The Taproot Foundation is all about “doing it pro bono!” They assemble teams of professionals to assist nonprofits with their projects. And they post frequently on VolunteerMatch.

CommunicAid helps nonprofits with their branding and communications.

Lots of independent marketing or communications consultants will donate time to a project if approached.

And Encore Careers help match people with meaningful jobs to create social change.

TECHNOLOGY & SOCIAL MEDIA ASSISTANCE FOR NONPROFITS

TechSoup

Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN)

BLOSON

InfoXchange Australia

STRATEGIC RESOURCES FOR NONPROFITS

Many universities have groups that are reaching out to provide services to the local community. In the Bay Area, for example, the Stanford Alumni Consulting Team provides pro bono consultants to nonprofits.

Compass Point Nonprofit Services

The Conservation Company puts out papers and writeups on capacity and does consulting for nonprofits and foundations.

GEO: Grantmakers for Effective Organizations is a network for foundations and nonprofits to make grantmaking more realistic and effective. They have a great video about themselves.

FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

CreativeCares has the potential to become an auspicing organization for photographers, much like Blue Earth Alliance, so that a photographer can apply for grants in conjunction with a 501(c)3 organization. Since many foundations don’t want to fund individuals, but do want to fund the kinds of marketing and awareness raising projects that photographers are a part of, this is an excellent funding strategy to pursue.

Another matching service for photographers and nonprofits is Photographers for Charity.

Photographers who want to donate specific images to be sold on behalf of charitable organizations can do so via Photographers for Charity (same name as above, but different org) and Collect.Give.

Focus for Humanity has a $15,000 grant for a project done with an NGO. Submissions open September 1^st and close November 1^st, 2010.

International Guild of Visual Peacemakers is getting going—I just joined their newsletter to see what they’re about. (Incidentally, their facebook page seems to be working better than their website at the moment.)

FILMMAKING

Lights Camera Help specifically has a volunteer match as well, and their film festival runs July 29^th-August 2nd in Austin, TX.

COMMUNITY BASED PHOTOGRAPHY

PhotoVoice helps people create participatory photography programs to empower communities.

“I think you should tell everyone to get in touch with each other,” says Burk. If you’d like to contact him, please do so at burk@creativecares.org.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

Related posts:

1. PAY UP! Photographers and NGO’s and $$
2. The copyright question
3. Can you help us answer a couple of questions?

Last week, I wrote about NGO’s and photographers, and cited a paper by Kimberly Abbott (on the Nieman Journalism Lab website) specifically about the new trend in partnerships between NGO’s and journalists in general. In that paper, she makes a lot of references to the complex ethics of such partnerships.

Each side of this partnership has ethical issues to consider. Journalists have to worry about maintaining editorial control and maintaining their audience’s trust in the truth of their reporting. Abbott sums up those questions as, “Can journalists really maintain independence when there is a stakeholder involved? And will the arrangement undermine the audience’s trust in the media, no matter how altruistic the cause?”

On the other side, NGO’s have to be very careful not to compromise the health, safety, and well-being of both their staff and their beneficiaries. Abbott writes, “Long after any collaboration produces a story, NGO’s must continue to work on the ground. If there is a perception that a group is helping one side of the conflict or the other, the lives of staffers, especially nationals, can be endangered, along with their beneficiaries.

“Compromising neutrality can also mean compromising access to vulnerable populations, or risking the ability to work at all. Governments in many countries are often looking for reasons to shut down or silence NGO’s, and affiliation with the wrong news report can give those governments the excuse they need.”

I think she sums up these ethical dilemmas very well. When I was working for the IRC in Tanzania, a number of years ago, an incident occurred that put this very set of issues into perspective for me.

And an anecdote

Our office was responsible for the medical care of about 80,000 Burundian and Congolese refugees in northwestern Tanzania, housed in 4 camps—less than ¼ of the total number of refugees housed in camps in Tanzania at that time. There were somewhere between 6 and 10 different large NGO’s working in these camps in our area, and the UNHCR ran the show.

Security in the camps was provided by the Tanzanian police force. Police came from different parts of the country to staff the camps in six-month shifts. You’d have police from Zanzibar, then police from Dodoma, then police from Dar es Salaam, changing every six months.

According to my colleagues at the various NGO’s, this meant that crime spiked every six months, as police prepared to leave the area, and thus lost any interpersonal accountability for their actions within the community.

Soon after I arrived at my job, one of these shifts was about to take place.

One day a shooting occurred in one of the camps. A fight had broken out in the market, I heard. Somehow, a police officer had been shot.

The police then went on a rampage through the camp, “looking for the perpetrator.” (There was some speculation afterward that it had been a policeman who had done the shooting—the details I learned about the incident were all very confused.) They accosted hundreds (maybe a thousand?) people, and arrested 20. Those 20 were taken to the local jail and tortured.

Because our organization was responsible for all the medical facilities in the camps, one of the doctors I worked with was asked to examine and care for the prisoners. I spoke to him when he returned from seeing them. He found that people had had broken bottles inserted into their orifices, and bicycle spokes inserted into their ears.

It seemed to me, as a newly arrived “program assistant” that we should write about this—that the police should not be allowed to get away with this kind of thing. I started working on an article to be sent out to the head office, in New York.

Meanwhile the NGO’s all held a meeting. They discussed the issue, and what would happen to the various constituencies involved if word of this behavior got out.

On the one hand, the police needed to be held accountable, and this was a terrifying occurrence. On the other hand, if the police (and therefore the national government) lost face, and were made to look incompetent, it would be very likely that major changes to refugee policies would be enacted, perhaps even expelling people from the country (and pushing them back into the war they had fled from). The way stations were already ludicrously overloaded at that time, filled with people who were coming into Tanzania and waiting for official approval in order to move into a camp. Sleeping structures built to house 40 people were housing two and three times as many. Men and women were all crammed in together. Rapes were occurring. People had nothing to do and were despondent. All of those people were being made to suffer already because of Tanzanian politics. And the IRC ran the way stations—they were tied to and responsible for all these people.

The NGO’s decided not to release any information about the torture.

I deleted my article. I was aghast. But I could also see the reasons for their decisions. The long-term benefits to transparency seemed to outweigh the short-term benefits in theory, but in real life, it was impossible to choose to jeopardize so many lives.

That’s just one reason why NGO’s and journalists have to recognize and understand their differences, even as they find new ways to collaborate. Stories like this one need to be told, but it cannot always be the NGO’s who tell them.

And man, these situations are so incredibly complicated. I’m still trying to make sense out of these things…and failing.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

Related posts:

1. PAY UP! Photographers and NGO’s and $$
2. Fazal Sheikh: fear, vulnerability and openness
3. Showcase: Exiled by weather

Well, YES! And no. I mean, of course! Except…sometimes not.

This is a complicated question.

From an organizational perspective, on the one hand you have a scenario like this: a large, international NGO with a significant marketing budget needs to make pictures to chronicle and advertise its work. It has a few different options.

1. It can hire a photographer.
2. It can work with volunteer photographers.
3. It can encourage its employees to also take photographs as a part of their work.

If you look at the International Rescue Committee, for example, they make use of all of these strategies.

On the other hand, you have a tiny organization based in a rural area, without access to technology, or sometimes even electricity. This organization has very limited ability to photograph itself, and very limited funds. This kind of organization has options as well:

1. No photography will be used in its work.
2. It can find a volunteer photographer.
3. It can fundraise, perhaps even with the photographer, in order to pay for the project.

And all organizations have a—perhaps inappropriate—mandate to keep their administrative costs much much lower than their program costs. I.e., donors these days seem to want the money they give to go “straight” to benefits for the clients, not to paying for the desks, equipment, marketing and employee salaries of the organization. That trend tends to put undue pressure on organizations’ marketing budgets to stay low, making them unable to hire a professional photographer. (For more on this problem, check out this paper called the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.)

Now let’s look at the photographers’ perspective.

Some photographers, as journalist Yves Choquette said in his comment to me on PhotoPhilanthropy’s Facebook page, have a day job. They are happy to volunteer their time, and don’t need to be paid. With the increasing popularity of photography around the world, the skill and knowledge about how to make pictures has increased. There are a lot of people who are not professional photographers who can make excellent images in the service of organizations.

There are also career photographers. Some call themselves artists, some call themselves journalists, but for all of them, photography is at the center of their professional identity. Those people need to make money, and they need to be valued. The society at large needs to recognize the importance of the work that they do, if they are going to be able to keep doing it.

However, the industry that has existed around photojournalists over the last few decades is shifting dramatically, as many industries are. I’ve written before about the music industry in relation to photography and the internet, because I think we are seeing successful journalists innovate, just like successful musicians.

One of these innovations is the NGO/journalist partnership, where the traditional client/service provider relationship is being replaced by a mutually beneficial partnership, in which money plays a slightly different role than it has in the past. I just read a fantastic summary of the rising trend of journalists collaborating with NGO’s to produce international news pieces, written by Kimberly Abbott on Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab website. “The picture emerging,” Abbott writes, “is one of journalists who are trying to find new ways to tell important international stories and NGOs that are adapting to meet that need.”

She goes on to say, “An editorial red line the media would have considered completely taboo to cross just a few years ago might be more palatable today as the financial pressures on news organizations continue to mount. Similarly, an NGO offering time, staff or funding to help a news organization might have once seemed far outside of its mission, but today it is an important part of maintaining a voice in a competitive field and ensuring that stories that affect so many lives still reach U.S. audiences.”

There has been a big discussion amongst photojournalists this week on the Lightstalkers discussion board around how much photographers hired by NGO’s should charge. It’s a discussion worth having multiple times, because there is no one answer—it really depends on each specific scenario. The comments posted there strike me as level-headed and practical. I found them well worth reading—they helped me gain a sense of what my own work might be worth. I think both photographers and nonprofit representatives should read them.

PhotoPhilanthropy pursues a few different strategies for supporting photographers and nonprofits.

We help match up volunteer photographers who want to donate their time or design a partnership, and NGO’s with small or nonexistent marketing budgets. The goal is to draw attention to social issues that are going unnoticed. That work is not meant to replace existing media, nor is it an appropriate type of project for all photographers or all NGO’s. It’s simply one of many ways to go about telling stories.

PhotoPhilanthropy also gives grants to photographers who have been able to carry out these kinds of collaborations with NGO’s (whether paid or unpaid) in order to provide social and material support to those people who are trying to use photography to make a difference.

In my own photography, I take a different approach all together. As someone who fits in no conventional categories as a photographer, I actually create long-term partnerships with nonprofit organizations, and I fundraise on behalf of myself and the org.

The benefit to me is that the organization doesn’t control me, or my images, or how I tell the story I want to tell. However, I do want their collaboration, so part of our relationship or partnership agreement is to allow them to influence the project. That ends up benefiting me as well—I learn about the issue I’m covering by communicating effectively with the organization, and I’m forced to think more carefully about the impact my work has on the individuals I photograph.

Of course, the big down side to working like this is that the relationships I build and the fundraising I do don’t pay all my bills, only some of them. So, for now, I’m also a photographer with a “day job.”

Sometimes nonprofits hire photographers. Sometimes photographers volunteer for nonprofits. Sometimes the two entities create a partnership funded by a foundation. I think these are all valid, useful, socially beneficial ways for photographers and NGO’s to interact.

Related posts:

1. The space between: what does it take for nonprofits to USE photography effectively?
2. Distribution–who’s responsible?
3. When transparency and humanitarian aid clash

We’ve all seen it: the photo of a teary-eyed African child, dressed in rags, smothered in flies, with a look of desperation that the caption all too readily points out. Some organization has made a poster that tells you about the realities of poverty, what they are doing about it, and how your donation will change things.

I reacted very strongly to these kinds of photos when I returned from Africa in 2008. I compared these photos to my own memories of Malawian friends and felt lied to. How had these photos failed so spectacularly to capture the intelligence, the laughter, the resilience, and the capabilities of so many incredible people?

Related posts:

1. Why is the color of poverty black?
2. Poverty Poem, by Fred Taban

These are similar to the issues that the music industry has been confronting for over a decade now. The industry itself has been slow to respond, and, I think, pretty uncreative in its responses. However, a smattering of individual artists have developed really innovative solutions to the problem of how to make a living while also letting go of their work enough to let it spread. It’s only by letting go that huge audiences can experience their work, which ultimately builds their market.

In March the NPR show On The Media did a fantastic program on this topic within the music industry. They featured one artist in particular, Amanda Palmer, who has excelled at innovating around her marketability and with her fans. “Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer,” she tells producer Rick Karr. “The answer is, there’s an infinite number of answers.”

Her solutions have included t-shirt projects (one of which raised $19,000 in 10 hours through twitter, according to OTM), flash-mob concerts that utilize public spaces and ask for contributions from fans in person, and by maintaining a blog and a twitter account that allow fans to engage with her in her innovation process, as well as understand more about the real life of a musician (i.e. why artists need fans’ money in the first place).

It seems to me there are two main elements to this innovation process. 1) Eschewing what people won’t pay for, and figuring out what people WILL pay for. In the music industry, people don’t really want to buy cd’s any more, but they do want to buy tshirts. They want merch. Bands have become brands. 2) Merging with patterns, and leveraging social media. People are spending their time and money on interacting digitally—so Nine Inch Nails, famously radical in the way they interact with their fan base, (making online treasure hunts for example) has developed an iPhone app. Radiohead was one of the first bands to shift the responsibility, and the power, overtly to the fans by releasing their album online for free, and asking people to make a donation in an amount of their choice. People want to support the stuff (music, pictures, objects) they love, so if you stop manipulating them and acknowledge the power they have as fans, you can catalyze voluntary, genuine, at-scale support.

I think it’s time for photographers to start innovating in similar ways. Journalism itself is iterating, testing out new models like ProPublica, citizen journalism, and new digital formats. So what are photographers doing? (Please send me examples of innovators in this arena!)

One evening last spring, I had a friend who specializes in word-of-mouth-marketing tell me, “Eliza, I want to challenge you to make your images shareable on the web.” I had been asking him for advice, but I had not expected him to say this. At first I thought NO WAY.

But after a year of blogging, browsing, tweeting and generally engaging with photography on the web in a new way, I think he is absolutely right. One of the best things photographers can do for themselves is to build an audience, and you can’t build a large audience right now without using the internet. I don’t lose anything from a) putting my images online, and b) putting them under a Creative Commons license. Even without that symbol, anyone can repost my images anyway, citing the fair use policy (which I agree with—we need cultural commentators just like we need artists).

It’s not as if I can make money from those images when they are 72 dpi anyway. Perhaps in a print format—either as fine art prints, or as printable files for editorial content—but my images on the web are not at a size where someone can print them nicely (or, not the way I print them, anyway!). And helping my images get spread around the web basically acts as free advertising on my behalf. It only helps me. By putting them under Creative Commons, I become an active participant in cultural change, rather than impotently fighting the inevitable. I become someone who is using the strengths of the internet to my own advantage. In a way, I regain control by giving up control. And I acknowledge the immense creative power that lies in building upon the work of others, which we do all the time.

A Developing Story has just launched a campaign that builds upon this same idea. They are asking why awareness campaigns, designed to save lives through health education, can’t be put under a creative commons license so that humanitarians, doctors, social workers and volunteers can have materials constantly available to them in the work that they do. It’s an interesting question.

All images in this post are licensed as Creative Commons on Flickr.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

Related posts:

1. PAY UP! Photographers and NGO’s and $$
2. Greg Constantine on shoeboxes and statelessness
3. Distribution–who’s responsible?

On our best days we’ve had nearly 1000 unique visitors, (though we average around about 250 per day); we’ve made it into the Guardian and La Republicca; we’ve been linked to and discussed on many of the most influential media and development blogs, and most importantly we’re starting to see a small community of people develop round the site.

All of which is fantastic, however, while we set up A Developing Story as a showcase for the best content out there, we also wanted to use it as a platform for a campaign to persuade Government, IGOs, NGOs and to use Creative Commons licenses in the communications work they do in developing countries. Material that we believe should be available to others working in the sector in a free online database.

Why? Because taxpayers like you and me fund vital communications work that saves lives, which is a good thing, but more often than not development organizations prevent others from re-using the work. It’s a bit like a charity using your money to invent a medicine that can save lives but then refusing to share the recipe. (There’s more on Creative Commons in this post I wrote last year including a great presentation on Creative Commons from one of its progenitors Larry Lessig).

We intend to start this campaign in earnest over the next couple of months, however, there are a couple of things we thought you might be able to help us with.

1. Can you help to quantify the annual global spend on international development communications in developing countries?

Having done a little thinking about this we reckon there are two possible approaches – one is to start from the top and work down – looking first at the global aid budgets, then the average communication spend as a percentage, and then the percentage of that spent in the developing world. Alternatively, it might be possible to try and piece together some figures from the bottom up, buy adding together figures from the UN, EU, and some of the major NGOs, etc, however, I think this might be pretty tricky, though looking at the way individual organisations spend their money might provide some useful touch points which could be used in the campaign.

We hope to turn all the data we get into an interesting infographic, and any work provided will of course be fully credited.

2. Who do you know nwho might be able to help us?

Who might be interested in supporting our campaign? Who should we send out letter to? Who might sign it beforehand? O.K. I know that’s more than one question, but we’d love to hear from anyone who might help.

3. Does anyone know a Flash developer who might do a small animation on a pro bono basis?

We’d love to make a little animation of the infographic to go with the campaign, however, we’re self-funded at the moment, and our pockets aren’t deep enough to afford a Flash developer. We’re not looking for anything enormously complex, just a minute or so of animation, we can use to explain and promote the campaign.

Thanks again for everyone who’s contributed to the site so far, without your input it wouldn’t be possible, as we both have day jobs and young families. We’d particularly like to thank Eliza Gregory, who’s contributed so much great material and whose offer to help with the campaign we’ve gratefully accepted. it’s great to have her on board, and if you haven’t read her posts, I urge you to check them out in the link above.

Finally, thanks in advance for any help on the campaign to introduce Creative Commons licenses into international development communications work.

Yours,

John and Benjamin

Related posts:

1. A Developing Story news update
2. Using Creative Commons licenses in international development communications