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

Multimedia by photographer Abbye Trailer-Smith on destitute asylum seekers in the UK. A series of personal stories punctuated by small details that amplify each testimony and make visible those most ignored.

Related posts:

1. Human Rights Video
2. Condition Critical

Fazal Sheikh is an artist and activist based in Zurich, Switzerland. His work has been widely exhibited, in institutions ranging from the Tate Modern to the Princeton University Art Museum to small huts in rural India. He has collaborated with numerous foundations and non-governmental-organizations, and he has won, among many other awards, a MacArthur Prize.

I asked him to do an interview with the PhotoPhilanthropy blog because he approaches collaboration, strategic partnerships and accessibility in a way that I find very inspiring.

I began our interview by asking how Fazal made his way to photography. He told me about his transition from ceramics to photography, and about how he figured out what to focus on while doing a Fulbright project in Kenya. He was there at a time when a huge number of people were fleeing Somalia and Sudan and seeking refuge in Kenya. So he traveled to the refugee camps, in the north.

FS: It seemed such an obvious thing to do, this simple act, but others had not approached the elders of the community, to ask for their willingness and permission. So I realized that was a very simple and direct way to begin working.

To visit a place, with an extreme vulnerability—which you have when you arrive in such a situation…I felt that I didn’t quite know how to render it. In fact I felt very intimidated about the idea of even beginning to photograph.

I traveled that first time with journalists and photojournalists—they weren’t inhibited at all about beginning to work and move through the camp and make these images. And I think that was not my sensibility. I was fearful of the idea of trespass.

And over the years, since then—that was in the early 90’s—I’ve started to realize that this fear that you have when you first arrive in a place is a good thing. Because although you may not know how to render the place, you’re also open to what it has to offer you.

And in that regard, the act of collaboration is kind of essential, because if there is any strength in the work I think it’s largely borne of what the people have given to this process.  They have said, look, this is the thing that’s interesting about our community. You may have read such and such, but we feel that this story of this person is important. Or, we’ve got this problem that nobody’s talking about.

EG: How does the way you make a picture relate to your goals as an activist and as an artist?

Well, I’m not very grand in terms of declaring that I’m going to single-handedly change any given issue. I think that kind of heroism is a bit overvalued. I think the best that we can do is begin to nurture a conversation.

And so your priorities when you’re making an image come through very clearly in the images that are produced. I’m very careful about the nature of trespass and I’ve opted for very formal portraits in the notion that it gives the person the chance to confront the camera: to confront me and by extension, the viewer.

And I think that, for me, that has value because it kind of levels the playing field.

You may have images that are made in a more photojournalistic realm, which do garner funds for these aid organizations, and I think they probably do that very effectively, probably much more effectively than do mine.

But, having said that, I think that it’s important to expand the vocabulary. Because the notion of just giving money to something to assuage your guilt is a kind of hierarchical relationship, wherein I as the giver am always above the person who is the recipient of those funds. And I never have the notion that I could be in that position, so I don’t adjust my behavior in the world to keep that from happening in the future.

But I think that’s a subtler and perhaps more complicated interpretation of what making images means. I wouldn’t like to dismiss those other kinds of images, I’m just not particularly comfortable making them myself.

And I can’t get away from work that is in sync with my own sensibilities. If you spend all this time in remote places, you’d like to be making work that you can live with, that you can stand by.

In the war photographer or photojournalist there’s always this degree of heroism. And I think there’s not much that’s heroic about going to a place to live for a month amidst people who live there for decades. You know. That’s heroism.

I think that the best thing you can do is just be receptive to what people have to tell you; be a kind of a vehicle—not a grand vehicle, but just somebody [who can] go and respectfully listen.

EG: I want to ask you about the Human Rights series. It seems to me from watching you over the last few years that your partnerships have become more sophisticated and complex.

FS: I hope I’ve become a little more sophisticated!

Initially, I think it was around the year 2000, I was a little bit unsettled by the idea that, in Afghanistan, I made a book that cost, I don’t know, 60 or 80 dollars, far beyond the reach of affordability for someone who was in the book. And I thought, well, wouldn’t it be interesting to try and make work that would be a little bit more accessible, and disseminate it, distribute it in a more democratic fashion?

So, although I continue to do the books, I also try to engage projects which allow that information to be filtered out, usually free of charge, and sometimes even going to people who don’t expect to be receiving the material.

EG: How do you do that?

FS: Well there are many different ways and I’m not always sure how successful they are. Some are more politically motivated: I did a piece called Ramadan Moon, which I did in the Netherlands, wherein we distributed I think 1,000 copies of that book. They were mainly distributed to politicians, lawmakers, the media, and governmental officials in the Netherlands, because it was about a kind of impropriety in their handling of immigrant cases.

But more recently, for instance…with the two Indian volumes [Moksha and Ladli]…we produced a series of posters, with the Open Society Institute—the Soros Foundation—to be distributed to 1,000 institutions in India. Women’s rights groups, universities, places that could house a set of posters and then mount an exhibition if they so chose, and then the posters would also remain in whatever archive was receiving them.

Again the idea was that you could make something free and accessible and in this case very political because it traversed the region from early life through old age and what it means for women in contemporary Indian society.

These are all experiments, but some of them are more effective than others. You have to accept that perhaps 30% of those that are received, people don’t really engage with, because it comes as a surprise often. But on the other hand, the poster series has had hundreds of exhibitions from it. Again, places that never would mount a proper exhibition; in rural areas, sometimes just a local hut, outside, taped up on the walls.

So to engage different facets of working: I’m happy and proud that the work is shown in museums–it also goes to university museums where you can engage with students. But having said that, it’s nice to imagine that people can look at the books on the internet or they can see a poster exhibition in rural India.

EG: How do you deal with giving people copies of pictures?

FS: It depends on the project. In the early projects I worked on I used Polaroid film, and these were people, generally speaking, who had never been photographed before, so the act of this collaboration and formal portraiture was well-orchestrated in the camps.

And then I would take the books back. And on several occasions I’ve used the books, years later, as a means by which to try and trace people, for instance in the Somali camps. And then more recently, let’s say in Vrindavan, which is the city of the widows, going back and forth. I mean I was revisiting the same people over the course of a couple of years, so I would either give them pictures then, or come back with pictures, or send the book when it was finished.

It’s important, wherever possible, to make somebody understand what the act of documenting really means. When you ask somebody for their permission, do they understand what it means if they are from a really rural area, that their image is going to be in a book or in an exhibition or some such thing?

And on occasion I’ve failed in that regard, because they are giving their testimony as a kind of catharsis and expecting it, in a way, to be brought forward, because they were claiming their story. I’m thinking more of the Somali images, one component of which were these voices of women who had been assaulted.

And I was concerned at the time that somebody would be reduced to that one moment of trauma in their lives, and so I didn’t publish them, and only published them years later when I did the second book. It was called A Camel for the Son and was about, essentially, a decade of life on the borders. And then I realized, in fact, if somebody has been strong enough to endure and to overcome such trauma, maybe it’s important to honor that, you know? And that I had in some way erred in not publishing their stories.

There are times when someone offers a poignant story and you have to be sensitive to when it’s appropriate to bring it forward, and you also have to be aware of where your own inhibitions or inabilities lie. As much as possible.

EG: I was looking at A Camel for the Son and noticing that you’ve had it translated into Somali. And has that made a difference? Has that changed the way you’ve been able to interact with the subjects and with other people afterwards?

FS: That’s hard for me to really judge. It was, for me, essential that it be in the language that they could also access; even on the internet it’s in their language. And I try to do that. I tried to do that also later, in the Indian volumes. Again to make things accessible.

In general it’s very difficult to mark a tangible impact of these things.

But I think that’s not so important. I think the best thing you can do is to put your work out there in a respectful manner, and, of course, hope that you’re not working in a vacuum. Which, I mean, I guess I’m confident enough to say I don’t think I’m working in a vacuum, but I also don’t want to declare that this work is certainly going to impact the situation in a certain way.

EG: How have you selected your projects?

FS: The early projects were very much based upon this dual narrative: one was the document of the place and the people, and the other was a kind of exploration of my own heritage, whether it was in Kenya with the legacy of my father; or, after working on that for several years, I went to work on the piece about Afghanistan, which was also exploring the legacy left me by my grandfather, my namesake.

And after that I think I’ve been drawn to things that are related to me in a more subtle way; sometimes an emotional, psychological resonance. Particularly issues which are not given a great deal of attention by others.

I think if you’re going to spend so much time and emotion dedicated to something, you want it to be something you really care about and something that hasn’t been attended to in a way you think might be useful.

So, for instance, the ones that, at the outset, you might say are less directly linked to me and my history would be Moksha, right? Which is a story about a town to which widows migrate when they lose their husbands.

But for me this was interesting as a challenge, because I wanted to make a piece that, when one looked at it, you’d imagine that it could only have been made by a woman. So not only to forge bonds across a religious, cultural, social divide, but also even to reach across gender. To explore the idea that maybe it’s possible to make a piece…in which you can meet somebody on a human level that transcends your gender divisions.

And I think a lot of the emotional tone of that book is very much in sync with some of my internal history, which is less readily described.

EG: How did you find out about the widows?

FS: This was sort of unusual for my working process, but I had read a small piece many years ago about this place to which widows were migrating, and I just thought it was kind of fascinating as an idea: the notion of exile, solace, hope all mingled together.

And so I determined to make one trip to visit the community. And, as in most of my projects, I never know if there’s going to be a means by which to make something. But I think that it’s worthwhile just going at first to see, and to explore whether you feel comfortable there.

It was the same thing as going to the African camps, in a way. You go with this extraordinary interest but also with this vulnerability of not being sure if you can do anything. And like I said—I don’t know if I said that clearly enough—but that moment of being really vulnerable has a great value, because it implies an openness.

It’s a moment of dread and fear for me each time.

But almost every project that I’ve worked on, I’ve had that feeling wherein you’re confronted with things that are new, that you don’t understand, that are at times intimidating. But though you are vulnerable and even on the defensive, you’re more malleable. You carry some of your priorities forward and they meet what the place has to tell you.

Fazal Sheikh’s upcoming projects involve a mid-career survey of his portraits and the final installment of his trilogy of books based upon India. Loosely speaking, he says, that volume is about heaven.

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

Related posts:

1. War photographer: a dangerous idolatry
2. When transparency and humanitarian aid clash
3. Showcase: Exiled by weather

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.

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1. Waiting to be registered
2. Showcase: Exiled by weather
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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)

Related posts:

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

Dadaab is a town in northeastern Kenya approximately 100 kilometers from the Kenya-Somali border. It is home to three refugee camps which have housed refugees for over 15 years. And while most (over 90 per cent) of the people living in the camps are Somali, there are also refugees from Sudan, Uganda, the Congo and other countries in conflict.

A Day in Dadaab from MSF follows the lives of 4 people in the Dadaab camps as they tell their stories, sing songs and recite poems reflecting on the harsh realities of living in a refugee camp and the dangers they fled from.

This video from the presentation is of Mohamed, a former policeman and musician, who fled the fighting in Mogadish. After more than 10 years, he finds himself in Dadaab camp in Kenya where he has gathered together a group of fellow musicians and artists. His song calls on Somalis to recognise the fruitlessness of war.

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2. Conflict in Somalia
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Fred Taban’s poem on poverty is a thoughtful and universal meditation on the bitter predicament that is faced on a daily basis by ever greater number of people on this planet.

Fred is captured beautifully by Stephen Alvarez, who is himself a great poet of the lens.

For me the poem illustrates the importance of giving people a voice, the importance to be heard. It’s also a great antidote to the idea that a direct debit from the developing world is all that is needed to solve poverty.

“Poverty, the day you are defeated

is the day the sun will not rise”

Thank you Fred and Stephen. Just wish more people were willing to listen.

Poverty, poem by Fred Taban from Stephen Alvarez on Vimeo.

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Conditional Critical is an ongoing MSF project designed to highlight the plight of those caught up in the conflict in Eastern Congo.

Violent conflict has plagued this region for more than a decade. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the run, fleeing the violence in North Kivu, South Kivu and Orientale provinces. People are frightened. Many are sick or wounded. Others have been harassed or raped, or have had everything they own stolen.

The most recent additions to the Condition Critical site are four multimedia slideshows from duckrabbit (you can view them at the bottom of the homepage). As you may know, Benjamin, one half of duckrabbit, is also a co-founder of this site, so I won’t say too much about them for fear of embarrassing him, though I particularly liked the fact that they use the real voices and testimony of those caught up in the conflict.

There’s also a short history of the conflict in Eastern Congo and a series of eyewitness reports and testimony.

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2. Hi, I’m a Mac
3. Cheka Kidogo – “laugh a little”

With the current state of Burma’s economy, hundreds of thousands of Burmese workers seek employment in neighbouring countries, away from the oppressive military-led State Peace and Development Council, with the most popular destination being Thailand.

Migrant workers usually work in the domestic, garment, agriculture and fisheries sectors.
Hours are often long, most shifts in the factories start at 7 am and often finish after 9 pm with no overtime payment scheme in place. The most common complaints from Burmese workers are that of abuse at the hands of their employers, unfair wage disputes, discrimination and in some cases, physical abuse. Burmese are viewed as lower class by Thai’s and often subject to inhumane treatment at the hand of their employers.

If accommodation is supplied, the workers are often charged high rents for a single room and in most cases 8 people will share the living space that is no more than a 7 ft square box.At the border town of Mae Sot, in Northern Thailand, The Peoples Volunteer Association (PVA) and the Young Chi Oo Burmese Workers Association aim to help Burmese where necessary.

Phoe Nge, 19, was shot 7 times by his employer and then left for dead. His crime was that of the bosses wife taking an interest in him. He was asked to visit his boss’s house and was held by the boss’s associates and shot repeatedly. He eventually managed to escape and ran to a friends house, bleeding profusely. Upon arrival at his friends house, he passed out and was rushed to hospital.

Phoe Nge still has a bullet lodged in his back and is recovering from the surgery whilst staying at a safe house provided by the PVA. His case is not unique within the Burmese community.

Other people I interviewed had been beaten and in some cases, raped by their employers and a small amount of cases resulting in murder. The problem stems from the fact that most workers are illegal and often don’t have the same rights as citizens, allowing them protection from abuse, which prevents them from speaking out in fear of being deported back to Burma.

The PVA and Young Chi Oo Burmese Workers Association try to defend workers rights in the Thai border town and have won a handful of large cases against employers who abuse workers. They both keep a list of cases of abuse against the workers and use the legal system where possible to bring the attackers and employers to justice.

In addition to employment issues, the Burmese also struggle with social integration, with domestic violence a big cause for concern. The PVA and Young Chio Oo offer advice and support to all Burmese families and try and prevent domestic violence at home.

Both groups operate illegally in Thailand as Thai law does not allow Burmese associations to be created inside Thailand, but Thai officials try to solve this issue by giving the aid workers cards to identify themselves to the police.

Workers who do speak out about the abuses are often fired and face deportation back to Burma. The PVA have recorded cases whereby factory owners have refused to pay workers the salary owed at the end of a month and called in the Thai Police to have the workers arrested and deported as illegal immigrants.

Mae Sot has numerous textile and garment factories. In most cases observed, Burmese workers made up the majority of workers inside the factories. Workers are paid, on average, 70 Thai Baht (R17/$1.50) a day for a 10 hour shift. However, not all factory owners abuse their workers. The one factory I did get access to admitted using the Burmese workers, as they were cheaper than Thai labour, but did admit that working conditions were better than others.

Thailand does offer a registration system for migrant workers, but the system has many flaws and many key problems still exist, which often leads to the workers being vulnerable to exploitation.

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“The problem with a lot of documentary photography on conflict is that people are used to seeing them. I’ve become a bit immune to the images and what they meant to me and I felt that if I could do something that made the people look like real people, that you can look in their eyes and see that they are just like you and me, that we might start to have a different perspective on them.” Rankin, 2009.

When Oxfam sent British fashion photographer Rankin out to refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to take ‘happy’ pictures, it ruffled a few feathers. However, there’s no doubt that Rankin’s photos of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have a great humanizing effect, and help balance the standard photographic stories that come out of ‘the dark continent’. Rankin’s photos of the Democratic Republic of the Congo tell the stories of people who, despite their circumstances, are part of the world, not apart from it. This behind-the-scenes video explains more (warning – autoplay).

Slideshows where photographers talk about individual photographs are usually a bad way to tell a story, they have a worrying ability to take the magic out of the photo, but I liked this one, as Rankin takes the subject head on with a minimum of pretention.

Hats off to Oxfam for having the idea and Rankin for bringing a fresh approach to an old story.

Related posts:

1. Congo’s gold
2. Condition Critical
3. Marcus Bleasdale; the Kimbangist Symphony Orchestra