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

“What happened to us should not happen to anyone.”

Photographer Susan Meiselas and reporter Dumeetha Luthra traveled to India for Human Rights Watch to retrace the steps of one woman who died after giving birth to a son.

Powerful and respectful work.

Related posts:

1. FORBIDDEN: Gays of Burundi
2. Unintended Consequences
3. Access To Life (Magnum)

I asked Maria Valdez what she likes to write about. “Well, I write poetry. And I write about the system. The CPS[1] system. Because I’ve been in and out of it a lot,” she said. “And I write about my mom. Because she passed away when I was two years old.”

“I tend to want more than I have,” she said. “But I think taking pictures I’ve learned that what I have is enough, you know? When I go around and take pictures, it’s like, ‘Look at everything that I live on and everything that I have!’”

That statement startled me—how true it is! Sometimes, looking is having—that’s why we love pictures so much, because they give us experiences, relationships and objects. They help our imaginations stretch father.

“There are some things that you can’t change with photography,” she told me. “But what you can change is the littering, the trash…everything that you can see. Like graffiti.”

I asked Marcus Vega what impact he sees photography as having on the group of students as a whole. “It’s grabbing everybody,” he told me.

“Like when I come here, I get to escape from my daily life,” Marcus said. “It just cancels out everything. It’s like a whole new environment.

“With photography, it adds on to the tools that I’m equipped with to tell my story and what it is that I see around me. It’s another outlet.”

One of the questions I had for the students was how they thought the program impacts their community as a whole. Each of them told me that the kNOw’s program helps people learn more about what’s happening all around them.

Marcus said, “With the kNOw, basically, what we’re doing is we’re informing the community about what’s going on. Because everyone’s off doing their own thing. And it’s good to see someone else’s side of it. It offers a whole different perspective, a whole different view. Like what people usually ignore–it gives them a chance to sit back and really see it.”

This kind of work also builds relationships. Miguel Martinez described how people will come up to him and say, “You write for the kNOw?!” or “I saw your article!” In a way, it gives people permission to talk to each other, and to talk to each other about difficult and meaningful issues.

Jaleesa Vickers has written some incredibly challenging pieces about her experiences, including essays on self-harm, racism, depression and bisexuality. When I asked her about what kind of reaction she’s gotten to her work, she said, “For the articles that I’ve been writing, because they’ve been so personal, usually it’s been shock. But I kind of like that reaction from people, because it gets them to think.”

She approaches photography with the same mentality. “Just like writing, I like to get people to think. To think about what I’m taking pictures of—usually, my community: what it needs, what has happened to it.”

And the benefit? “I think what we’re doing just gives other people a greater sense of community,” said Jaleesa. “Because they’re so wrapped up in their own lives, what we do helps them know what’s going on around them, if they don’t have the time to see that. I think that’s the major benefit from doing all this.”

There are great images in the world. There are pictures that move you to tears, or to joy, or that seem to lift you up. But community-based-photography recognizes that there is another beautiful aspect to photography—that the process of making pictures builds relationships and makes people happier. You don’t have to be a famous photographer for your pictures to be powerful. And whether it’s used in communities that are strong or communities that are struggling, photography is a remarkable tool for bringing people together.

Says Miguel Martinez, “It’s just a real interesting, fun thing, taking pictures. I really cannot put it into words. When you get one good shot, you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m going to keep going.’”

In case you missed it last week, here is a slideshow of a few of the kNOw’s photos for 2010.

Thank you Jaleesa Vickers, Marcus Vega, Maria Valdez and Miguel Martinez for talking with me!

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.org

Related posts:

1. Disastrous Photography? – a perspective on Haiti
2. Local photographers and International NGO’s, an African perspective
3. The space between: what does it take for nonprofits to USE photography effectively?

If you are interested in the story of child mortality you need to understand the real figures behind the horror stories we see in the news. The amazing GAPMINDER website and this video is a cracking place to start.

Nearly 10 million children under five die every year. Almost 90% of all child deaths are attributable to just six conditions: neonatal causes, pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles, and HIV/AIDS.

The aim (Millenium Development Goal 4) is to cut child mortality by two thirds by 2015.
How can this be achieved?
Which countries make sufficient progress?
And by which rate did a country like Norway reduce its child mortality the last 100 years?

Watch Gapcast #11 to understand the background and the current status of a Millenium Development Goal.

httvp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWI_1QoQ9aM

Related posts:

1. Nepali child beggars
2. In Silence: Susan Meiselas
3. Visualizing ‘Africa’: from the lone child to the middle classes

Over the years it seems they’ve done exactly that, funding the kind of international journalism that often is without a sponsor in the USA.   But for journalism to retain any integrity it cannot simply rely on something as intangible as ‘a deep sense of responsibility’, it must be grounded in a solid set of ethical principles and it must be accountable.   Without these principles journalism doesn’t shine the light into dark places, it becomes the dark place.

Several weeks ago I came across  a set of pictures on Facebook and Photoshelter by the talented photographer Marco Vernaschi which focus on the subject of child sacrifice in Uganda. The work is both being funded and promoted by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

It’s a decent enough story, but not one that is in any way new.

The pictures are black and white, often blurred, without hope and even evoke a sense of nihilism.  Nothing however in my journalistic career could prepare me for the disturbing truth as to how a number of the photos were taken.

By his own account a grieving mother was persuaded by Vernaschi to exhume her child’s body so that he could take photographs of her mutilated daughter, after which payment was made money ($70) was given to the chief who facilitated the digging up of the body, and the picture published by the Pulitzer Center.

Vernaschi’s actions only became public when another journalist, Andre Liohn, traveled to Uganda to undertake his own investigation.  He raised the issue with the Pulitzer Center last week but received no response. Instead they forwarded his complaint to Vernaschi who has written his own account of events on the Pulitzer Center website. Here’s an extract:

Being there, out of the blue, in the darkness of this creepy night asking a broken-hearted mother to show me the mutilated corpse of her daughter …  then they consent to show me the body. I explain to them that this evidence will be crucial in several ways.  Three people start digging in the garden by the house, where the family had buried Babirye just a few hours before … I give the mother some money, making sure this amount will be enough to hire a lawyer. She’s a proud woman, and despite the amount being very modest, she says it’s enough. I hug her again, and at this point she grabs my hand, and say:  “Please, don’t let us down”.

On the 19h of April I emailed both Jon Saywer, (Executive Director of  The Pulitzer Centre on Crisis reporting), and Marco Vernaschi asking them if they could answer a number of critical questions regarding the work. My two main concerns are:

1. That one of the images published of a naked child with his penis cut off and a catheter protruding from the scar is indecent and if published in the UK could potentially be deemed illegal under the 1978 child protection act.

2.That by requesting parents dig up their murdered child and then by taking pictures of the corpse and subsequently making payment to the parents Marco Vernaschi had broken any reasonable understanding of ethical behavior by a journalist.

In the UK according to the Protection of Children Act 1978 ‘it is an offence to take, permit to be taken, make, possess, show, distribute or advertise indecent images of children in the United Kingdom.’  I am of the opinion that should the full frontal photograph showing a boy naked, with his penis cut off and a catheter in its place, be hosted on a British website there is a possibility that it would be deemed obscene by a jury and therefore illegal.

To me the picture is a further violation of the child’s dignity, made permanent by the unrestricted publication of the work on the internet. If a three year old American or British girl had been abducted, raped and her vagina mutilated it is inconceivable that the Pulitzer Center would support a photographer to take full frontal nude pictures of that girl. Why then is this an acceptable act if the child is Ugandan?

In his defense Marco Vernaschi wrote to me stating:

I can hardly argue whether this picture would have been done/published if the boy would have been American, or European. I can only say that to me this makes no difference, and that when I was taking this pictures I was there with Mukisa’s father and aunt, who were desperate and worried about the future of the child. I’m currently looking for some foundation that will be able to follow and support Mukisa through the next years …

The Declaration of The Rights of The child states:

The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in  conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for this purpose, the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration.

Rarely, if ever, should the rights of a child be considered less important than an individual journalists pursuit of a story.

The BBC’s editorial guidelines are a highly regarded benchmark for objective journalism. They put child protection above almost any other consideration. This is taken from those guidelines:

We must ensure that the physical and emotional welfare and the dignity of people under the age of eighteen, and in particular children under fifteen, are protected during the making and broadcast of programmes and online content, irrespective of any consent given by them or by a parent, guardian or other person in loco parentis.

We must ensure that children and young people are not caused unnecessary anxiety or distress by their involvement in programmes or by their broadcast.

If photography is dependent on showing naked pictures of grossly abused children to affect change than as a medium it is without merit.

Morally a parent cannot give a photographer permission to take a photograph that degrades their child.  The argument that the end justifies the means only holds weight if  you persuade me that there is no other way to help this child then to violate his right to dignity.  Clearly that is not true.

Photography is too powerful and important a medium to be reduced to the absurd notion that only the most graphic pictures will affect change.

This is not the first time a journalistic institution has published a picture of the boy whose name is Mukisa. The BBC conducted their own investigation which ran as a documentary on TV, Radio and on the BBC News channels.  The story was seen and heard by millions of people.  Here is the photograph the BBC chose to publish. Its quite different from Vernaschi’s (seen below in an edited form).  In accordance with the BBC Editorial guidelines a decision was taken to not show the boys face.

The role of the Pulitzer Center cannot be overlooked in the their institutional support of this work.  In his response to me Jon Sawyer Executive Director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting wrote,

‘I can say that we work very closely with our journalist grantees, with the aim of adhering to the highest possible standards both of journalism and ethical practice.’

However there are a number of important questions I put to Sawyer in my email which he choose not to answer. These are:

1. Given the Center’s commitment to ethical practice do you believe this child’s dignity has been preserved firstly by the photographer taking this picture and secondly by the Pulitzer Centre funding and linking to this image?

2. Would you have published this photograph if it was an American child?  And if not why is it acceptable to do so in Uganda and not in America?

3. In what way does the Pulitzer Center’s editorial guidelines differ from that of say the BBC?

The stated aim of the Pulitzer Center is:

‘to fund independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage of global affairs’.

It has over the years been successful in achieving that goal.  I am left puzzled though as to whether the Pulitzer Center actually has a set of editorial guidelines and if so how these were applied to Vernaschi’s work?

Another question that needs answering is how Vernaschi reached the point where he felt morally justified to ask a mother to have her daughter’s body exhumed so that he could take pictures; an act so far outside of my understanding of human decency that I find it hard to comprehend.

Furthermore what moral justification does the Pulitzer Center have for publishing the photos of the exhumed child?

In his response to me Jon Sawyer dodged the question:

In general my view is that the work should speak for itself, and that we should avoid injecting ourselves in side discussions on blogs, especially on a project like this that is both highly sensitive and in the very early stages of presentation.

I hope that you will permit Marco to present fully his reporting, and the reasons for the decisions he made, before reaching firm conclusions yourself. We will be weighing in ourselves, on the issues you raise and others, as the project proceeds.

By his own account Vernaschi persuaded the girl’s mother to commit a crime by exhuming the body, an extremely traumatic event for any parent.   This is taken from the Ugandan penal code:

121. Hindering burial of dead body, etc. Whoever unlawfully hinders the burial of the dead body of any person, or without lawful authority in that behalf or otherwise than in accordance with rules made by the Minister disinters, dissects or harms the dead body of any person or, being under a duty to cause the dead body of any person to be buried, fails to perform such duty, commits a misdemeanor.

Vernaschi’s main defense revolves around the notion that his photographs are in some way forensic records and that he is following in the footsteps of photographers like James Nachtwey:

These kind of critics have already been moved in several others occasions, for example when James Nachtwey photographed a church where hundreds of children had been slaughtered and killed in 1994  DRC genocide. These pictures that were strongly criticized by some at the time of publication, contributed to document what was going on and are now considered history of photojournalism as they concretely contributed to bring attention on the war in DRC. I could mention many other similar examples, but I think the concept is clear.

According to Vernaschi the authorities were already investigating the murder of the child.  By digging up the body vital evidence needed for a conviction may have been lost. Forensic pictures are taken in controlled conditions by professionals. In an attempt for a deeper understanding I re-wrote to Vernaschi:

Can you understand that if you asked the parents to exhume their child’s body and then photographed that body and then paid money people will find that extraordinary?   Put everything aside and please try and answer that question. That’s the crux of the issue and I believe that that’s what people will focus on whatever is produced from now.

This is Vernaschi’s edited reply:

Asking the family for permission to exhume the body is not something I decided lightly. It was hard to do — hard to ask and hard to see. The family asked for money only after the exhumation, and after my filmed interview.  This visit wasn’t planned, and I had very little money on me. When the family asked for help I gave them 150.000 Shillings — the equivalent of USD 70. That’s what was in my wallet.  I do not see anything wrong with offering that help, under those circumstances.  My hope is that the actions I took will be considered, and judged, in the context within which they occurred.

Vernaschi, who I respect for being so open with me, writes,

‘I can only give you my personal opinion, based on my moral guidelines and convictions as a photojournalist.’

For me that’s the crux of the problem.  His ethical boundaries are dictated by how he feels and a delusional sense of the importance of his work that allows him in this instance to work outside any recognizable limits of journalistic integrity.

I have some sympathy for Vernaschi who has dug himself deep into a story so extreme that it would damage the strongest of minds. But I am bewildered by the role of the Pulitzer Center who seem oblivious to the damage this work causes to the integrity of journalism, as well as their own reputation, and the appalling precedent it sets.

In America the National Press Photographers publishes a code of ethics which I’ve listed below.  You could read through the list and tick off which points of the code you think have been broken in the case outlined above, or you could save yourself a lot of pencil and just tick off the ones that haven’t.

Code of Ethics Visual journalists and those who manage visual news productions are accountable for upholding the following standards in their daily work:

1. Be accurate and comprehensive in the representation of subjects.
2. Resist being manipulated by staged photo opportunities.
3. Be complete and provide context when photographing or recording subjects. Avoid stereotyping individuals and groups. Recognize and work to avoid presenting one’s own biases in the work.
4. Treat all subjects with respect and dignity. Give special consideration to vulnerable subjects and compassion to victims of crime or tragedy. Intrude on private moments of grief only when the public has an overriding and justifiable need to see.
5. While photographing subjects do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events.
6. Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images’ content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.
7. Do not pay sources or subjects or reward them materially for information or participation.
8. Do not accept gifts, favors, or compensation from those who might seek to influence coverage.
9. Do not intentionally sabotage the efforts of other journalists.

UPDATE 1:

The photographer Jørn Stjerneklar has written a challenging analysis of another series of Vernaschi’s photos:

http://www.maydaypress.com/blog/page9_files/09f6d2fbd43e90615782e4e115d95b41-0.html

UPDATE 2:

The Travel Photographer has published a searing analysis of this story here.

Why can’t these photojournalists and publishers understand that they cannot continue to show pictures of mutilated children??
It’s immoral. It’s as simple and as complex as that.

UPDATE 3:

Joerg Colburg who writes the renowned blog Conciencious blog has also picked up on the story,

The idea that asking very crucial questions is just a side discussion that should be avoided because the project is “highly sensitive”? Oh really?

I am not so sure this is the kind of reaction I would have expected from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

UPDATE 4:

The Canadian writer, photographer and veteran A. J Somerset has just posted on his blog, Banjaxed. He is convinced that Vernaschi acted in good faith, but goes on to write:

Looking at Vernaschi’s slideshow, I find myself wondering if the publication of these pictures, and the photo of three-year-old Mukisa, whose penis was cut off, isn’t symptomatic of a problem with the work overall. These photos, for the most part, communicate little. We have many shots of kids in prisons or on the streets. We have photos of “healers” at work. And most of them tell us little; they’re high-contrast black-and-white pictures in which detail is lost to lighting and to various in-camera blur effects.

I feel that, without the three graphic pictures, Vernaschi’s story amounts to little. And I think that may well be why he felt they were necessary. But this doesn’t justify what he did to get them; instead, it suggests he should have found a different way to tell his story

UPDATE FIVE:

There is also a debate about the work on Lightstalkers here

UPDATE SIX

Miranda Gavin of Hot Shoe fame has written an excellent post on Hotshoeblog in which she asks an expert on the Convention of Human Rights to give an opinion,

Whether the British press, for example, would have published such graphic pictures of a British child is an interesting question. We may have become numb to reports of atrocities and mutilation in Africa, and it does appear as if there are two standards of decency, one for the sheltered Westerner, and another for the inhabitant of the ‘dark continent’.

Related posts:

1. Showcase: Exiled by weather
2. TED – Ideas Worth Spreading
3. Waiting to be registered

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

Save The Children had just sent us this powerful audio slideshow about the way in which a harsh winter is affecting people in regions of Mongolia. This is how they describe the situation on their website:

A ‘dzud’, the name Mongolian herders use to describe a fierce winter that usually only comes around once in a generation, has left families struggling to get by.

As many as 300,000 pastoralists who rely on livestock to make a living and to feed their children are seeing their livelihoods and health ravaged by -45°C temperatures and thick snow, which has resulted in the deaths of millions of livestock.

It’s a shame that we don’t get to hear first hand from the children or the parents the hardships that they are facing but this is still a good way of breaking a story.

Related posts:

1. Audio slideshow: Kenya dhow captain fears new port
2. Showcase: Exiled by weather
3. Slideshow: The Forgotten

Now it has branched out to major cities around the world to bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

The best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free online. More than 450 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week.  These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

TED is a brilliant platform for these speakers to address large audiences with a range of subjects from international development through to photography and technology.

Below is a video I recently watched from Kristen Ashburn. In this moving talk, documentary photographer Kristen shares unforgettable images of the human impact of AIDS in Africa. Moving and poignant, but at the same time a truly magnificent way of engaging with people who view these seminars.

Related posts:

1. Access To Life (Magnum)
2. How To Take Photos Of Africa Or Where Intent And Ideas Collide
3. Through Positive Eyes

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)

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The New York Times is running a slideshow by photographer Jan Grarup about life in the Daadab, reportedly the oldest refugee camp in the world.

“The strength of the project rests within its immediacy,” Mr. Grarup said. “It has an honesty to it.”

I was in Daadab not so long ago myself. I may not have been there for long but I was there long enough to notice that life in the camp wasn’t one you would wish on the  worst of your neighbors -Kenyans and Somalis from Somalia aren’t the best of neighbors.

In the camps there is of course suffering but I would also have loved to see images of the children that were playing in the camp, images of the schools set up, images of the street with all the shops where refugees who’ve refused to be victims of circumstances are taking charge and rebuilding their lives.

Where are the photos of the weddings that happen in the camp and where are the photos of people who despite their many tribulations, still observe prayers without fail? Where are the photos telling the other side of the story?

Many Kenyan Somalis whose land hosts the refugees have less even than the refugees themselves. A girl pulling a 5ltr jerrycan of water is not an uncommon sight, in some place not far from the camp, people walk for kilometers to fetch water; dirty water.

The UNHCR has done a lot to ensure that the refugees get their basic needs met. A lot more has to be done, but a good story shows both sides. People in the camp, at least in Daadab are alive, not waiting around for death.

(Dolphine Emali is an award winning Kenyan photographer who was nominated for an Amnesty International Media Award in 2009)

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