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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full article by John Edwin Mason here.

Related posts:

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

Conspiracy for Good is a new augmented reality, transmedia, ARG from Tim Krings, the creator of Heroes.

According to Conspiracy for Good’s Facebook page it’s stated aim is:

The Conspiracy For Good is a community that strives to inspire people to come together in common causes, through a shared narrative. The end game is to change the world for the better.This community is built to be filled by your ideas and actions.

There’s a live event this Saturday in London. Conspiracy for Good is sponsored by Nokia and there are related games and apps available from the OVI store. It’s an ambitious project, and what impact it has remains to be seen. Do these causes share a narrative? Is transmedia narrative the best way to engage young people with causes? I guess we’ll know more in a few weeks, in the meantime, it’s an interesting project which I reckon merits some attention.

No related posts.

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

“Year-round in Ghana, the sun sets at 6pm and rises at 6am – thus, the residents of communities lacking electricity live half of their lives in the dark. Over ten years ago, the government of Ghana began a massive campaign to provide the country’s rural north with electricity, but the project ceased almost immediately after it began. The work sluggishly resumes during election years, as candidates attempt to garner popularity and votes. But at present, an estimated 73% of villages remain without electricity in the neglected north – an area comprising 40% of the country.”

Peter DiCampo.

Life Without Lights from Peter DiCampo on Vimeo.

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As you may already know if you read ADS there’s a very direct link between your favorite gadgets and the conflict that’s ravaged the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo over the last decade. Something explained in more detail in this recent video parody of Apple advertising from the Enough Project.

Essential parts of our electronic devices are made from minerals found in eastern Congo. Tin, tantalum, tungsten, and rarer elements like coltan are all used in out mobile phones, iPads, and laptops. And in a well regulated economy under the rule of law, this wouldn’t necessarily be a human rights’ problem, however, in eastern Congo the same armed groups that control most of the mines are responsible for the epidemic of violence in eastern Congo.

Attacks on the local population are frequent. Rape is endemic. In addition, the labor conditions in the mines are abysmal. Indentured servitude is common practice, and children as young as 11 are used to squeeze into the tight spaces underground to extract the minerals we use.

According to the Enough Project there are:

few conflicts in the world where the link between our consumer appetites and mass human suffering is so direct.

So while Apple is by no means the only tech company using conflict minerals in their products, they are currently the highest profile, and this video has managed to attract a lot of attention to the issue in the last few days.

Steve Jobs responded to concerned e-mails generated by the campaign yesterday with a suggestion that while they’re concerned, there’s little Apple can do about this.

If you’re unconvinced by this response, this is Steve Jobs’ e-mail address. Not least because there is hope that this campaign can make changes, after a long campaign people are aware of the notion of conflict diamonds. And while that scheme may not be perfect, it does suggest that people do care about the real price they’re paying for their Blackberry, HTC Desire or iPad.

Related posts:

1. Congo’s gold
2. Condition Critical
3. Stop Stock Outs!

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

This is a complicated question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now let’s look at the photographers’ perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

Related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eliza Gregory writes a weekly blog for PhotoPhilanthropy.

Related posts:

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