Just another set of limb chopped Africans by a famous photographer
Written by duckrabbitThe headline on the BBC website reads:
In Pictures: Rebuilding Wrecked Lives After Sierra Leone’s civil war
Sounds interesting?
Then I flicked to the set and found another story to the one sold to me in the headline.
There’s nothing technically wrong with Nick Danzinger’s black and white pictures of people from Sierra Leone except that it feels like we’ve seen them a million times before.
The whole process of NGO’s sending big name photographers to Africa to capture the misery so that the NGO, in this case the International Organisation for Migration, can get their pictures onto news websites feels very tired. The results are often, though by no means always, predicatable and the whole process is starting to feel very two dimensional.
My main problem here is that the photos do not really show a country in recovery. The headline feels misleading. My cynical one at the top of this post is probably more accurate. What do the pictures really achieve? What are they meant to achieve? Do they educate or inform or even entertain or just reaffirm stereotypes?
I think it’s a myth that you need a big name photographer to get your pictures on the BBC website. They seem very open to high quality work.
Finally I would say I don’t get a sense of anyone’s story through these photos. Certainly not in any depth. Why can’t we hear the voices of these people? Why are we always asked to feel sorry for them?
I do feel sorry for them. Sorry that they’ve not been given a voice. Sorry that IOM hasn’t yet realised that by giving these people a voice they could have a real and lasting impact on the way I and others feel about the people living in this part of the world.
Author — duckrabbit
duckrabbit is a production company formed by radio producer/journalist Benjamin Chesterton and photographer David White. We specialize in digital storytelling.
Discussion (8 Comments)
What’s been done to these people will endure till their deaths, you don’t want people to forget- even though as we’ve already seen (way too many times), photographic documentation is no guarantee that it will prevent future occurrences, while furthering the pervading African horror story motif.
Your suggestion is clearly best- give voice to these people in their own words. It helps empower both their images and their lives, helping them transform from victims to survivors, and perhaps from survivors into advocates and activists.
innit.
compare the effect from viewing this set of images to the experience you get from Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences, for example http://www.mediastorm.org/0024.htm
then cast your eyes down below the media storm multimedia browser at all the ways you can help the Rwandan families and others like them to try to rebuild their lives
and then listen to Jonathan talking about the project and look at his eyes while he’s speaking. this is real photojournalism
http://www.mediastorm.org/0024.htm
sorry, the photographer interview is under an icon on the top right, marked ‘epilogue’
grrr…spam filter got me.
my first post said:
innit.
compare the effect from viewing this set of images to the experience you get from Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences, for example http://www.mediastorm.org/0024.htm
then cast your eyes down below the media storm multimedia browser at all the ways you can help the Rwandan families and others like them to try to rebuild their lives
and then listen to Jonathan talking about the project and look at his eyes while he’s speaking. this is real photojournalism
A good friend of mine was born in Sierra Leone and has worked on a variety of projects in and about this country. I saw his photographs of amputees in the late 90’s. A few years ago he did a documentary on the diamond trade which focused on the rise of co-op mining schemes and the way people were trying to take control of their lives and work. It stated what many other similar projects did not – that the Sierra Leonians were trying to rebuild their country after years of war and that they needed help to help themselves, not pity at their plight. To show the effects is one thing, but that is not the same as showing the methods of recovery. I sometimes feel that if I were shown not just the problems but the ways in which these problems are being address and can be overcome, than I would be more inclined to help.