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

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

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

Kenya’s government is planning to build a massive new port – expected to be the busiest in East Africa, serving neighboring countries such as Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda and DR Congo. But the port is near Lamu, a beautiful, unspoiled island, which centuries ago dominated the region’s trade in ivory, gold and slaves. Some local residents are looking forward to the wealth they hope the new port will generate. But dhow captain Fahad Mohamed Musa fears that the development will hurt local fishermen.

Lamu is indeed a magical place. It’s a place you go to find or lose yourself. It’s a big dilemma this because with all the pressure caused by lack of employment and high poverty levels, Kenya needs the port. But then again I can’t imagine the serenity of Lamu destroyed.

The more we get the more we lose.

Related posts:

1. Save the Children, audio slideshow, Mongolia
2. Slideshow: The Forgotten
3. BBC Slideshow: Kabul attacked

Waiting to be registered:

Rajib writes:

They have to flee from their own country. They have no food, no work, no land and…… no Help. Because they are ethnic minority, they are Muslim, they are unregistered Rohigyas. Specially unregistered Rohingyas, are in a dual trap, in Myanmar Nasaka (Myanmar Military) will not allow them in their own homeland and in Bangladesh they have no identity.
Now two to three lac Rohingyas are living in Bangladesh who have fled from Myanmar due to persecution. About 32 thousand of them are registered. They are supported by the Bangladesh government’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner [RRRC] and the United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees [UNHCR]. But the other two and half lac unregistered Rohingyas do not know where to go for help, for food, for work to survive.
Thousands of unregistered Rohingya refugees have flocked to the Kutupalong makeshift camp in Tekhnaf, hoping for recognition and assistance. Instead of help, local authorities have told them to leave the place, unregistered cannot live beside the official camp. Nor can they legally live in a place adjacent to forestry department land. So where to go?

In a very dirty place, too hard for a human being to live, thousands of unregistered Rohingyas are living in a slum in Kutupalong, I saw. In a 8×6 feet house more than five people are sleeping. Parents even cannot give their child one meal in a day. Besides every year the number is increasing for the high birth rate. There is no family planning, as there is no education. Children only go to Madrasa for religious education. There is no sanitary toilet here. No source of water. Recently they somehow manage only one tube well. No medical help. They die without any kind of treatment. Even if people die they don’t know where to burry it. Hundreds of people are waiting to go outside the camp for a work. Some of them go for work like as a day labor in wholesale fish market, in a fish trawler or rickshaw puller. But it is very risky, the police and border military BDR are arresting unregistered Rohingyas. And they are pushing unregistered people back to Myanmar. But the Myanmar military Nasaka will shoot if they find any people crossing the border. So, no where to go.

Related posts:

1. Waiting to be registered
2. Showcase: Exiled by weather
3. Tibet Exhibition Shut Down

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)

Related posts:

1. Waiting to be registered
2. Fazal Sheikh: fear, vulnerability and openness
3. A Day in Dadaab

As the debate about Afghanistan persists, one set of voices is rarely heard: that of Afghan women.

As the debate about Afghanistan persists, one set of voices is rarely heard: that of Afghan women. In its multifaceted project, “Behind The Veil”, the Toronto Globe and Mail offers an honest look at life behind the veil for women from all walks of life in Kandahar, one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous cities.

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2. Sitara Achakzai 1957-2009
3. Close To My Heart

I’m a big fan of the photographer David Gilkey so today I’m highlighting a couple of exceptional multimedia pieces that feature his photography and his voice.

The first is from Gaza and the second Haiti where in typical reflective style he asks the question, “What if it was me?”

NPR in Gaza, A Photographer’s Journal from NPR on Vimeo.

David traveled to Haiti just after the earthquake left the capital in ruins. Back in D.C., he reflects on his experiences photographing amid the wreckage.

Related posts:

1. A Shelter In Haiti
2. Haiti multimedia
3. Haiti: January 12 – Ron Haviv

The BBC’s photo Editor Phil Coomes has just put up a photo slideshow of the Taliban’s attack on Kabul today.

It shows the havoc that a small group of determined militants can unleash on a city.

Related posts:

1. Audio slideshow: Kenya dhow captain fears new port
2. Slideshow: The Forgotten
3. Save the Children, audio slideshow, Mongolia

Many people are unaware of the problems that plague the Caribbean island of Haiti, which is one of the most impoverished and environmentally degraded countries on earth.

For a while the spotlight will be on Haiti as the country struggles to cope with the impact of the catastrophic earthquake that hit on the 12th of January.

Those who would like to understand a little deeper about the country should spend some time with Ruth Fremson, a photographer for The New York Times, who uses this multimedia feature to discusses the violence and poverty that continue to plague the Caribbean nation.

It goes without saying that the power of this feature would be so much greater if Ruth had recorded the voices of some of the girls featured in the photographs. That said she comes across as thoughtful, concerned and informed and the story of how one priest saved the lives of so many destitute girls is powerfully told.

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1. Haiti:Triage at the Airport
2. Haiti multimedia
3. Mapping Haiti