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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. Middle classes in Africa
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Middle Classes in Africa is a project from photographer Joan Bardeletti and collaborators that aims to understand and describe the middle classes in Africa and the role they play in the continued development of the continent.

Funded in part by the French AFD and Unesco the project aims to:

* Present a new but realistic vision of Africa to the public of developed countries. Working on Middle Classes to lead the people to question themselves rather to inspire them pity about the continent.
* Explore new ways of associating photo essay and classical research work. Raise concerns on the links between this middle classes population and the african continent development. Place this issue into the agenda of public and private decision makers.
* Ease the dialogue between Africa and western countries.

Middle Classes in Africa is an ongoing project that will eventually document the middle classes in six different countries. The first two sets, on Kenya and the Ivory Coast, are available here.

Related posts:

1. Visualizing ‘Africa’: from the lone child to the middle classes
2. How To Take Photos Of Africa Or Where Intent And Ideas Collide
3. Rediscovering Poor Whites in South Africa: Deja Vu (All Over Again)

People do not hang around to be depressed. The media overexposes us to images of suffering I think, consistently giving us two messages: 1) there is really nothing one person can do to affect these overwhelming problems, and 2) money donated to Africa will be diverted by corrupt governments and aid agencies and never get to the people who need it.

The interview focus’ on Karen’s new book, Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa. I get the feeling that Karen’s not going to win any photography awards anytime soon for this work. Why?  Because its not black and white, skin and bones pictures of people drawing their last.  This work has depth.

Here’s a short excerpt from the interview:

Miki Johnson: Should photojournalists seek out the silver lining?

Karen Ande: Considering that today is World AIDS Day, this seemed like the perfect time to highlight a new book from photographer Karen Ande, Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa. Although hardly the first person to document this topic, Karen’s emphasis on telling positive stories is unusual. And her technique presents a hard — but important — question for documentary photographers: Do too many images of suffering make people feel helpless to improve things?

These three women are members of a granny support group that meets weekly to discuss issues and solve problems related to caring for their many young charges.

Miki Johnson: Tell me about the book you just released with Ruthann Richter, Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa. What was the impetus of this project and what were you hoping to achieve with it?

Karen Ande: This book represents the culmination of seven years of work. The project began in 2002 when I was traveling in Kenya with my husband and friends. Our tour guide asked me if I’d like to visit an orphanage she had opened in the town of Naivasha and photograph the children, whose parents had died of AIDS.

I agreed to do it, thinking it would be a one-time visit that might result in a few shots she could use for fundraising. I did not realize that the children would charm me and that their survival hung in such a delicate balance. The orphanage ran out of rice the day I was there.

read the rest of this excellent interview here.

No related posts.

The story of war is never far from the news.  These days you can be pretty certain that wherever a gun is going off, the lens of a camera is not far behind.  But what happens after war, in the aftermath? The other half of the story. The one that really counts.

Last year’s short conflict in Kenya was one of the most photographed in African history but once the killing slowed to a trickle most of the international photographers packed their bags and moved on.  In the aftermath of the violence the UN asked for several hundreds of millions of dollars of cash to clean up but not a single dime to collate a visual record of the story of what happened, and not a penny to capture/document the story of the aftermath.

I believe this was shortsighted.

There is no doubt how the story of the aftermath continues to be recorded will impact what happens the next time Kenya goes to the polls, will a  play in role in whether the country reconciles with its past and builds a more equal future.  Most importantly it will ensure that people cannot re-write history in an attempt to insight violence between tribes.

I was there in the aftermath trying to make a difference, to tell the story of those forced to flee from their homes.  It was there that I came across the photography of Yasuyoshi Chiba.

One shot forever sticks in my mind, that for me tells the story of the aftermath in a way that still knocks me out. A man using the rubble of his own house as weights to lift on an iron bar.  It tells a different story of the people of Kenya than the one shown on our TV’s. It speaks of their resilience, pride and determination to rebuild their lives. (see Yasuyoshi’s photo below)

That was the Kenya I grew to love and admire, and that’s the Kenya that I share with people when I speak of the place. Neither purely negative nor purely positive, but real, and endlessly, unrelentingly complex. A developing story.

That’s why of all the awards going in photography to me the AFTERMATH project matters the most. Why? Because it supports the telling of stories that help to shape both our understanding of the past and the path we walk into the future:

The Aftermath Project is ‘a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict — the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace.’

Recycling the wreckage of a destroyed house – Yasuyoshi Chiba.

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Award winning photo by Yasuyoshi Chiba of a crowd watching the result of the recent American Presidential election in Kibera in Kenya.

(C) Yasuyoshi Chiba.

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