‘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

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

Odong Obong, barely 3 days old, is tended to by his mother, as he lays under a mosquito net with his twin brothers Opiew and Ochan, in a hospital ward in Akobo, Southern Sudan, Thursday April 8, 2010. AP Photo/Jerome Delay.

As it happens, this week I am writing an essay on the photography of famine for a new book. The essay draws on the collaborative Imaging Famine project that started in 2005, and incorporates the points I made in a presentation for the Photography and Atrocity conference in New York that same year. I’m taking some time away from that essay to do this post because of my concern with the basis for claims fuelling a controversy in the blogosphere about famine photographs.

On checking my Twitter stream today I followed @PhotoPhilan’s link to a short post by Andrew Sullivan on “Stereotype porn”  Sullivan was noting William Easterly’s post at Aid Watch on a story out of Sudan last week, and juxtaposed it with Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omaar’s 1993 op-ed on “disaster pornography in Somalia” (which, in another serendipitous moment, I had been reading yesterday as part of my research on the problematic use of “pornography” to categorise famine photographs – but more on that another time).

Easterly’s post claimed that:

The UN takes the photographer to the “hungriest place on earth”, Akobo, South Sudan (HT Wronging Rights). Then

The aid groups Save the Children and Medair have canvassed the Akobo community over the last week, searching for the hungriest children.

And surprise: you get the most horrific images possible of starving children, to be featured prominently on the Huffington Post, which reinforces the Western stereotype of “famine Africa.”

An equivalent procedure would represent New Yorkers by the most horrific images possible of the homeless. But we don’t do that because we don’t have the stereotype that typical New Yorkers are homeless…

Easterly is spot on with his criticism of how selective images produce stereotypes that represent an entire place in terms of a single dimension we would never accept if the shoe were on the other foot. But, I wondered, was this a conscious act of photographic manipulation, the crude pursuit of certain pictures regardless of context? So I followed the links to try and find out.

Easterly gives a ‘hat tip’ to Wronging Rights, which posted this last Friday as part of its “WTF Friday” roundup:

“Let’s not be sensational, guys. Let’s just go to the statistically hungriest place in the world and take pictures of emaciated babies. Because as Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal say, ‘Photogenic starving children are hard to find,’ but this has got to increase our odds.”

This certainly grabbed my attention because it seems to show crude intention on the part of a photographer or aid agency to deliberately find and construct certain pictures. There is no doubt that has happened in the past – a point made by their link to the de Waal and Omaar 1993 op-ed, which could have been the source for Sullivan’s citation of that same story – but was this Sudan story another case? Was this quote evidence of a new instance?

No, it wasn’t. The quote is the voice of the Wronging Rights blog reading an article on The Huffington Post. The quote is made up, and does not appear in any form, direct or indirect, in The Huffington Post article. That story is in fact an Associated Press report from Akobo in Sudan and makes no mention of the role of any photographer (see the version The Huffington Post used in full here, with a longer version here). The AP story reports on the food insecurity of a region where 46% of children are classified as malnourished with 15% being the threshold for classifying a situation as an emergency.

How was The Huffington Post/AP story read as evidence of photographic manipulation? With no direct reference to Jerome Delay, the photographer who seems to have accompanied reporter Jason Straziuso, the likely connection comes from the following paragraph:

The aid groups Save the Children and Medair have canvassed the Akobo community over the last week, searching for the hungriest children. They found 253 that they have classified as severely malnourished, meaning that they will die without immediate intervention. The children are now enrolled in a feeding program that relies primarily on fortified peanut butter.

It seems that the transmission of this story from Wronging Rights to William Easterly and on to Andrew Sullivan – accompanied at each turn by de Waal and Omaar’s 1993 op-ed – has created a view that the aid groups’ “searching for the hungriest children” was something done primarily for photojournalistic rather than public health reasons. But as the first comment on Easterly’s post suggests:

When you have a project trying to cure children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM), of course you are going to canvas the community to find the SAM cases. That’s what case finding and public health is about. They didn’t canvas the community so that a photographer could come in and take a picture.

You can blame the photographer and the publication, but I don’t think you can blame the agencies for trying to find and cure malnourished children using a standard public health strategy.

I think William Easterly is technically right to say the UN took a photographer to Akobo. I’ve done research in southern Sudan in the past and know how the logistics work. I imagine that the AP reporter and photographer travelled with a UN agency and/or NGO, and that while those agencies were carrying out their humanitarian and public health tasks, they took the journalists to feeding centres at which it was possible to produce photographs of malnourished children. I have no doubt that the UN and the NGOs would have wanted the publicity the AP provided, but I do not think there is evidence from the stories cited to argue that this operation was a callous search for photogenic victims above all else. For the critique of famine photographs to be effective we have to be careful in what is claimed.

That said, there are questions to ask about the representation of this particular case. There is, as William Easterly argues, no let up in the production of famine stereotypes. For me what stands out is the way the AP report canvasses a range of possible causes for the food insecurity of Akobo – the continuing violence, failed rains, tribal clashes, and “a budget crunch on the government of southern Sudan because of the financial crisis means fewer available resources.” Yet the photography persists in reproducing the stereotype of largely isolated children, with eleven of the twelve images in the AP gallery showing these passive victims.

To be fair to the photographer, in these circumstances we have to accept that in large part he has accurately portrayed the people in the feeding centre. But is the feeding centre the real locus of famine? Can a photograph represent the many causes of this emergency? And what is the effect of these stereotypes once again marking Sudan as the “hungriest place on earth”?

One of my refrains for how we should understand photographs in these situations is that the problem lies with the absence of alternatives as much as it does with the presence of the stereotypes. Which means I should conclude with a double-page spread published by The Guardian this morning on the Sudanese elections. Clearly any place that is home to both food insecurity and a practicing democracy cannot be simply represented.

[This post originally appeared at http://www.david-campbell.org/2010/04/13/famine-photographs-critique/ on 13 April, where there have been a number of comments debating the issues.]

Related posts:

1. South Sudan Info
2. PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards

Of course anger going nowhere is a wasted emotion.  But on target and on mass it can have a powerful effect.  And it can come from something as basic as understanding in a little bit more depth the reasons why so many people on this planet suffer so much and so unnecessarily.

Here is a good example of a video that made me feel really angry. Now what do I do with that anger?  Well if Save The Children could accompany this video with a powerful info-graphic about malaria and how it can be stopped, alongside a meaningful way in which I can respond, then they will have turned my anger into action.  Times that by many = change.

(Thanks to Adam Robertson for sending me the link)

Related posts:

1. Climate change, a dying story?
2. Covering Climate Change
3. Save the Children, audio slideshow, Mongolia

Every few years, the media rediscovers South Africa’s most exotic species – ”poor whites.”

Children walk through a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

White people, after all, aren’t supposed to be poor, especially not in Africa.  The white South Africans of our imagination are privileged — each and every one of them — and spend most of their time braaing boerewors by the pool, while their maids do the dusting and gardeners trim the hedges.  When we discover that’s not always true, it comes as a real surprise.  It shouldn’t — we’ve learned this lesson more than once — but, in the western imagination, whiteness is so firmly associated with affluence (and blackness with poverty) that we have to relearn it time and again.

Last week, it was Reuter’s turn to explore the lives and habitat the South African “poor white.”  The catalyst was a visit by President Jacob Zuma to a whites-only squatter camp, during which he pledged to ensure that its residents received their fair share of government services.  Zuma first visited the camp in 2008, during his campaign for office, and said, at the time, that he was “shocked and surprised” by what he saw.  (For him, too, whiteness and poverty were an unlikely combination.)

A family smokes together during a quiet moment at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 13, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

Reuter’s photographer Finbarr O’Reilly made these photos in Coronation Park, a former holiday caravan [trailer] park west of Johannesburg, that has become a refuge for impoverished whites.  (This is not the site of Zuma’s visits.)

In a post on Reuter’s excellent photographers’ blog, “Hardship Deepens for South Africa’s Poor Whites,” O’Reilly writes that, while ”most white South Africans still enjoy lives of privilege and relative wealth, the number of poor whites has risen steadily over the past 15 years.”  He explains this increase by mentioning both “affirmative action laws that promote employment for blacks” and ”the fallout from the global financial crisis.”

That’s certainly true, as far as it goes, but it’s worth pointing out that poor whites, in South Africa, are nothing new.  They were part of the social landscape long before affirmative action and the recent economic meltdown.  White society in South Africa has always been stratified by class, no matter how strenuously those who promoted white supremacy and those who denounced it insisted otherwise.

Friends talk through the window of a one-room hut at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

During the first two centuries of colonialism in southern Africa, the poor white settlers who attracted the most notice were the trekboers, semi-nomadic farmers who raised cattle and other livestock for the market.  To many wealthier whites and European travelers, they were dirty, lazy, and racially degenerate, having adopted a mode of living that was indistinguishable from that of blacks.  (It’s a view that’s had a very long shelf life, in both print and images.)

By the beginning of the twentieth century, poor whites were both an embarrassment and a threat, at least as far as their social superiors were concerned.  The expansion of commercial farming in rapidly industrializing South Africa drove many whites off the land and into the cities, where they found work (or failed to find it) in mines, shops, and factories.  Elites feared that they would combine with black workers to threaten capitalist development.  A good deal of subsequent legislation was designed to make sure that would never happen, by offering whites access to jobs, education, housing, and political rights that were denied to blacks.

Family at lunch, 1962. David Goldblatt.

The policies of the segregationist governments, before World War II, and the apartheid government, after it, reduced white poverty, but didn’t end it.  Anomalies within a system of white supremacy, poor whites have been endlessly worried over, written about, and photographed, with various mixtures of curiosity, compassion, contempt, and concern.  He understood that it was perfectly possible to be both a beneficiary of racial injustice and the victim of class exploitation.

Ella, daughter of Freek and Martjie Marais, in the children’s bedroom, Gamkaskloof, Cape Province December, 1967. David Goldblatt.

By embracing complexity and respecting his subjects, Goldblatt found ways to get around and beyond conventional image-making.

If there’s a man-bites-dog quality to most reporting about poor whites — and there is — the same can be said about reporting on rich blacks, especially, again, in Africa.  Rich blacks fascinate us (western viewers and western media) for the same reason that “poor whites” do.  They contradict our expectations of the way the world is “supposed” to be.

Durban, South Africa.  July races, 2005. Martin Parr/Magnum.

Slate, the online magazine, recently published this photo from Martin Parr’s series Luxury. In introducing the series, the magazine said that ”Traditionally, the portrayal of poverty has been the domain of the ‘concerned’ photographer, but Martin Parr has photographed wealth in the same spirit, believing that when people of the emerging upper-middle classes around the world demand and receive the luxury goods that are taken for granted in the West, the pressure on the world’s resources will be considerable.”

It’s not entirely clear what Slate’s editors mean by “in the same spirit.”  The spirit of exoticism and wonder with which poverty, particularly African poverty, has been approached?  A spirit that sees “emerging upper-middle classes” as being as threatening as the poor, but in a different way (threatening to deprive us of the resources we need to sustain the western way of life)?  Who knows?  It’s a statement that’s illuminating partly because of its incoherence.

None of this, of course, is what Parr, elusive trickster and satirist that he is, would have had in mind.  But, like all photographers, he has little control over how people interpret his work.

Charles Kapié with his partner in the street close to their office.  At 30 years old he has created and runs a consulting firm in agronomy and a cyber café.  He used to be a civil servant and he invested his “rappel” (first year of salary paid at once) in his activity and resigned after one year.  He was paid $400/month. He situate himself in the middle of the Middle Classes. Joan Bardeletti.

Like Goldblatt’s photos of impoverished whites, Joan Bardeletti’s series Middle Classes in Africa is an antidote to the sort of nonsense that I’ve been talking about.  Bardeletti says that he wants to present “a new but realistic vision of Africa to the public of developed countries.”  He hopes that his photos will lead people to question their preconceived ideas about Africa, “rather than inspire… pity about the continent.”

This is some of the most original and challenging photography to come out of Africa in a very long time.  You can see more of it, here.

Related posts:

1. Why is the color of poverty black?
2. Middle classes in Africa
3. How To Take Photos Of Africa Or Where Intent And Ideas Collide

As much as I’m committed to progressive photojournalism, I have to like this cover from the Onion:

The nice touch of imitating the New York Times Sunday Magazine only gilds the lily, as the photographic convention being lampooned is used everywhere: glossy magazines, newspaper ads, direct mail, web sites, billboards, photography books, TV documentary trailers, and more.  You can donate or you can turn the page, but you can’t avoid seeing the picture.

There actually is a continuing debate among human rights advocates and cultural critics about such rhetorical appeals, and the Onion cover neatly summarizes a number of key arguments.  First, the problem of human deprivation is given a human face, but at the cost of reinforcing damaging stereotypes.  The poor (and the Third World) are portrayed as essentially dark, passive, weak, simple, and dependent (need I add that images of want usually are of women and children, and often female children?).  Second, analysis has been replaced by the direct emotional impact of the visual image, and reasoned commitment by a sentimental appeal.  You are asked to help an individual child who seems so close that you could pick him up and hold him, although the money will in fact go through many hands and may make no difference whatsoever in his life.  Third, the poster child’s innocence and obvious dependency dissociates charity from any serious attention to structural change, an inattention that often excuses how the US and other affluent nations are also among the causes of the problem.  Fourth, the magazine’s tony production values suggest that there is money to be made off of human misery, and even the photographers’ mixed motives are exposed–indeed, are the point of the parody.  Fifth, the enduring contrast between deprivation and the affluent world of the magazine audience is all too obvious: $5 per day is not going to set anyone back on this side of the street, and yet mere charity is all that is imaginable, not serious redistribution.  Finally (for now, anyway), the audience may experience the perverse pleasure of indulging in feelings of pity about the suffering of others while giving their middle class conscience an easy out.  Whether I donated or not, I gave at the magazine, so I can feel sorry for the poor and good about myself–and turn the page.

Actually, there are additional criticisms, and all of them can (and have been) developed in great detail.  So why does the debate continue?  There will be many reasons, but one is inescapable: the images work.  Despite having become highly conventional, images of needy children open purse strings.  Furthermore, if the appeal is not effective, no one else is likely to step in and make up the difference.   So, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and most advocates conclude it is better to do than to do nothing.

Other options remain, however, especially for photographers looking for another angle on a problem.  Instead of the exceedingly conventional character of the typical humanitarian image, one might want to ponder this photograph:

Of all the images of the Haitian disaster, I find this one to be surprisingly eloquent.  And it shouldn’t be: I shows no people, only property, and instead of the close-up that might grab one personally, we have the distant and distancing impersonal perspective of an aerial view.  Nor is it an action shot, and there are no dramatic special effects such as smoke and fire.  One might think the most likely reaction is simply, “well, at least it’s over, and although there is a lot of damage, it’s only property damage, not lives lost.”

That’s not what I see or feel when caught in this photograph.  Somehow it reveals the massive dislocation that remains after a catastrophe–the profound wreckage, disorder, waste, and raw mess that remains.  It also reveals that disaster has its own full weight of inertia.  Nothing that has been crushed together in that picture can be pulled apart and moved back or out of the way, much less restored to what it was, without labor, effort, work, and much more of the same, just to get back to even.   And imagining it being sorted out–or, more likely, bulldozed–starts one thinking about how it got there, and about what ought to be put back and what ought to be built anew but differently.  The photo reveals the enormous forces that were involved, and requires that one imagine what the city should be.  In short, it demands more than is required to give five bucks to a child (or a photographer).  And if people aren’t evident, neither are the denigrating associations that pull people down.

Communication depends on conventions of representation, but it can become trapped in them.  As much as humanitarians rightly insist on the value of the individual person, there may nonetheless be times when we don’t need to see another face.  Given the scale of the humanitarian disasters now and to come, more thought might be given to how even things can speak.

Onion Magazine cover from issue 45-45, May 2, 2009; photograph from Chile by Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press.

This post was first published on No Caption Needed.

Robert Hariman is a professor in the program in rhetoric and public culture, department of communication studies, Northwestern University.

Related posts:

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Photo credit: Shahidul Alam/Drik

Shahidul’s new exhibition “Crossfire” examines extra judicial killings and torture allegedly carried out by the Rapid Action Battalion in Bangladesh. According to the exhibition,

Human rights groups maintain that over 1000 people have been killed by RAB since its inception. All such deaths have been attributed to gunfights between RAB and criminals where the people in RAB custody were caught in crossfire. No member of RAB has yet been killed in crossfire.

The New York Times Lens blog reviewed the exhibition’s photographs noting that,

Instead of a literal document of the killings, Mr. Alam created a series of large images that are evocative of the places where the victims were murdered or discovered — a still-life film noir in Technicolor. With the help of researchers, he examined cases to point out inconsistent details in the official accounts…A field [see above] that was supposedly the scene of a shootout is portrayed undisturbed, suggesting the corpse had only been dumped there.

When Rob Godden of The Rights Exposure Project wrote about “Crossfire” a couple of weeks ago he concluded with the prescient observation that we should “spread the word, [because] this one may get shut down before it even opens.”

So it came to pass. On Monday of last week police cordoned off the gallery just prior to its opening, leading to a siege of the exhibition (see the New York Times coverage here). This has led to protests outside the gallery, and condemnation from some newspapers in Dhaka and Amnesty International in London.

Shahidul Alam remonstrates with police outside Drik Gallery, Dhaka, 22 March 2010. Photo: Saikat Mojumder/DrikNews

It is insufficient, but from a distance we can do little more than applaud Shahidul and the Drik community for their commitment, and let both them and the Bangladeshi authorities that we are vigilantly watching their actions. Drik has a long record of photographic activism drawing official censure (evident earlier this year in the Chinese opposition to their Tibet show), and we can learn a lot from their work.

Similar action by police against a human rights photography exhibition occurred in Zimbabwe last week. On Wednesday 24 March The Guardian reported:

Zimbabwean police today returned graphic photos of human rights violations under President Robert Mugabe to an art gallery they had raided 24 hours earlier.

Yesterday officers seized all 66 images from the Gallery Delta in Harare and arrested the head of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Organisation, known as ZimRights, which organised the exhibition.

Police said the images were not fit for display because they showed nudity and injuries, and because the show’s organisers could not prove they had consent from all the subjects.

But human rights activists won a high court ruling to have the pictures sent back for the exhibition’s opening, which was to be attended by the prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, and foreign diplomats.

Let’s hope the courts in Bangladesh can uphold principles like the High Court in Zimbabwe. With police keeping the Drik Gallery closed, Drik has begun legal action to remove the blockade and restore freedom of expression (see The Daily Star story on this development here).

Related posts:

1. Crossfire
2. Tibet Exhibition Shut Down
3. Participatory photography – jack of all trades, master of none? Part I

If you have 15 mins spare, do check it out, despite the poor audio this talk is very thought provoking. Other talks from the day can also be accessed on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. “What if that was me?”
2. ‘Crossfire’ censored – the power of documentary photography
3. Why is the color of poverty black?

Caption: Bududa, Eastern Uganda. A boy walks over the churned mud after heavy rains caused landslides on Mount Elgon on Tuesday. Three villages were engulfed, at least 80 people were killed and around 250 are missing. The Guardian, 6 March 2010, p. 23. Credit: James Akena/Reuter

James Akena’s photograph of a young victim from the mudslides in Uganda recycles all the main elements in the dominant representation of ‘Africa’. As James Ferguson writes in his important book Global Shadows, “for all that has changed, ‘Africa’ continues to be described through a series of lacks and absences, failings and problems, plagues and catastrophes.’

The Bududa mudslides that Akena’s photo for Reuters symbolises are certainly worthy of reporting. The question is: regardless of the intentions of the individual photographer – a Ugandan who is an accomplished stringer  – why did he choose this particular composition? And, equally important, given that he will have taken a number of images on site, how did this particular photo come to be selected by The Guardian to represent the story?

The choices that Akena made in taking the photograph, and The Guardian made in making it the largest picture in its ‘Eyewitnessed’ double page spread for the first week in March, are evident when compared to other pictures from the same event. On The New York Times Lens blog Stephen Wandera’s photograph (see slide 2) for AP shows a large crowd at the scene searching for survivors, while a Ugandan TV report also shows the community at large. These demonstrate that the photograph of the lone boy is a specific choice with particular effects that tap into a long history of visual representation.

It is time for the photographic visualization of ‘Africa’ to offer something different. In this context, it is worth noting that only two days prior to the publication of the Bududa photograph, The Guardian ran a story in its business section headlined “Africa begins to make poverty history.” It opened with claim that:

For decades, it has been seen as the world’s lost continent. Now, a new study says that the view of Africa as a basket case is wrong.

As the continent prepares to welcome thousands of international football fans for the World Cup in June, it seems the image of an economically vibrant region the hosts are keen to project is closer to the truth than tired stereotypes suggest.

It’s an important — though contested — account of recent economic trends that should give pause to those who simply recycle the old stereotypes, and some photographers are producing different perspectives that challenge those stereotypes.

One significant project doing this is Joan Bardeletti’s “Middle Classes in Africa,” a twenty-month project in six countries documenting the rise of this group and their potential role in the development of the continent. Three of the stories – from Mozambique, Kenya and the Ivory Coast – are on-line now. One of the pictures from the Mozambique story won a World Press Photo award this year for the “Daily Life/singles” category.

Caption: Un dimanche après midi en famille sur la plage près de Maputo. Joan Bardeletti/Picturetank

Bardeletti’s photographs show people, places, institutions and cultural events that are modern, well-resourced and more than a little familiar to the European eye. They reveal a complexity to ‘African’ life that belies the stereotypes. However, we have to refrain from seeing Akena’s photograph as ‘negative/wrong/false’ while Bardeletti’s are ‘positive/right/true’. These are tired forms of critique that overlook the fact that all photographers make aesthetic choices in the construction of imagery. In terms of what ‘we’ outside of ‘Africa’ see, the overriding concern needs to be less the presence of particular pictures than the absence of all the alternative possibilities.

It will be interesting to see how many media outlets use Bardeletti’s photographs and stories once the project is completed in the summer of this year. Of course, there are many economic challenges still facing the continent – such as the the “land grab” of agricultural resources revealed recently by John Vidal – but a more comprehensive visual account of ‘Africa’ must include photographs like Joan Bardeletti’s.

(As well as being an accomplished multimedia producer, David Campbell is Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at Durham University, U.K)

Related posts:

1. Middle classes in Africa
2. How To Take Photos Of Africa Or Where Intent And Ideas Collide
3. Rediscovering Poor Whites in South Africa: Deja Vu (All Over Again)