Two ways photojournalists can help change the world

It’s true, if you are a regular reader of duckrabbit you will know that we believe some colors are more equal than others, but the issue of inequality has as much to do with class (at least in the UK) as anything else.

One of the biggest problems is the price we pay for damaged parents bringing up  damaged children who go on to live damaging lives.   Throw poverty into the mix and an increasingly warped media and no-one should be surprised as to why the UK prison population has nearly doubled in the last eighteen years.

You reap what you sow.

It could so easily be me behind bars.  At sixteen I’d taken every drug possible but crack cocaine. I was of no fixed abode and struggling to come to come to terms with a physically and emotionally abusive childhood in which my religious fruitcake parents believed I had demons and exorcised me before I was five. You know it doesn’t just happen in Africa.

When I became a dad, my biggest fear was that my son Sam would feel the same way I did at times as a child. How was that?  Lonely, very, very lonely and times an overwhelming wish to be dead.  Some, maybe many people reading this will understand that, and my heart goes out to the child in you.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad, far from it.  Light comes from all kinds of extraordinary places. Tiny gestures of kindness from people that give you hope. And if I look back there is someone at every point in my life that believed in me and that’s why I am alive writing this today.

In every sense we are who we are because of other people. As if to prove it I just received an email from a friend who grew up on the wrong side of town. ‘Thanks for believing in me Benjamin, it changed everything.’

I know exactly what he means.

If you are a photojournalist there are at least two ways you can help change the world.

1. The hard way. Take pictures.

2. The easy way.  Share your light with other people.