A Developing Story» A Developing Story | What would you save?

What would you save?

Benjamin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:07:15 +0000

What would you save?

Martin Parr has been photographing people affected by floods in Vietnam for Oxfam. There’s some really interesting shots and the accompanying text certainly helps to bring the slideshow to life.

“The danger with NGO photography is that it has the potential to all look the same. Flicking through the weekend magazines, the viewer is going to flip through quickly when they see more black and white pictures of people starving. My job is to try and do something different, that hopefully might get people to actually read it.”

Wouldn’t it be great though to actually hear these people’s stories?

Interestingly the head of media at Oxfam, Sam Barrett (@samdbarratt) is asking for feedback on Twitter.

Interactive storm

Benjamin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:59:36 +0000

Interactive Storm

Oxfam have ambitiously launched an interactive documentary that explores the effects of climate change on a community in Bangladesh.

The photography was by the Bangladeshi photographer Abir Abullah proving that International NGOs can forge powerful relationships with photographers local to many of the areas that they operate in.

You can experience the documentary here, or visit A Developing Story’s blog to read more thoughts on the documentary.

Interactive storm

Benjamin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:35:51 +0000

A Developing Story is impressed that Oxfam have put so much effort into creating an online documentary about the effects of climate change on the people of Bangladesh. This is a both an ambitious and well realized project that works on many levels.

On the upside Oxfam used a local media team who were on the scene when cyclone Aila hit. Respect.

There’s also a clear way of responding by sending a message to the team who are traveling to the Copenhagen Climate Change conference on the UK’s behalf to negotiate a deal.

I think it’s really important that charities give people some way to respond other than putting their hands in their pockets. Sure that’s one way of helping but it’s more important that people are engaged in these issues, that they aren’t given the sense that charitable giving can lead to any kind of widespread meaningful solution to the serious problems of inequality in this world.

On the downside there’s no way that I can embed any of the stories on A Developing Story, limiting the ability of the documentary to travel around the web. This is surely a mistake if Oxfam are serious about getting the message out (and clearly they are). I’m not talking about dumping videos on youtube, but offering a fully embeddable feature that people can host on their blogs and websites. Human Rights Watch have already started to experiment with this kind of approach to great effect.

I know for a fact that when I embed a video on duckrabbitblog many more people watch it than if we just pop up a link to a video on an external website. Generally though, to get on a site like A Developing Story, the quality of the content needs to be decent, and up till now that has been the major problem for NGOs, their communications often leave me cold.

Cheka Kidogo – “laugh a little”

Benjamin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:02:42 +0000

Cheka Kidogo – “laugh a little”

“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.