'One of the hazards of publishing a well-known photojournalism blog - getting multimedia like yours, where the photos are both powerful and moving, and I end up in tears at my desk.'
'I am a fan of duckrabbit. I am not a fan because I agree with everything Ben has to say, but because he says it without frills and then will spend the time necessary to engage the consequent discussions. Such commitment is a priceless commodity.'
'I met one of them at an academic conference in the summer. He was the sanest person there, but sure enough by damn gadnabbit ruffled more than a few fluffed up peacock feathers.'
I’m in charge of Funky Friday, make no mistake. So, If I say this Ray Charles tune is befitting, so be it.
It has been missing from the tintertwizzle for many a moon, but I found it again. And boy, what a song. Probably my favourite Ray tune ever, and that’s saying something. From the album Genius + Soul = Jazz.
The first time I ever heard this tune was when it came on the radio as I was returning from photographing a football match down in London somewhere. I had to pull over on the M1 to write down the title. Glorious. Enjoy.
Well, she already has. And now it looks like she could be having your beloved Portra, your faithful Tri-X, your perfect T400cn and all the others. I’m feeling quite emulsional.
(Adopts perfect John Peel accent):
“And that, dear listeners, was The Tea Set and ‘Tri-X Pan.’.
And did you know, 99% of Gargoyles Look like Bob Todd”
A comment attached to this post meant I had to answer with this post. The comment asked, if Lee Morgan was swinging music, what did a swinging photograph look like? At first I thought of ‘Grand Prix de Circuit de la Seine’ by Jacques Henri Lartigue, which is probably a better answer than the one I am about to provide. It’s certainly a better photograph, although mine’s fun too, so there.
This is a swinging picture:
Swingers convention, New Orleans, USA. Orgy room.
I suppose if you’re going to be picky, and I know you are because I can see it in your eyes, the above is not really a swinging picture, it’s a picture of swingers.
It is actually a picture of a small part of a 1500 strong group of swingers who took over an entire hotel on Bourbon Street in New Orleans ( What a street that is).
I had been commissioned to cover the 5 day event for UK Marie Claire. I’d found the story, and the mag thought it sounded ‘fun’, so off we went. When I say we, I mean the reporter and myself. Only thing was, the reporter was a woman, and happened to be my wife. So, 1500 swingers, 750 couples (only couples allowed), and one couple who were pretty sure they weren’t into swinging, and who had a job to do. That’ll be us then. So, 1502 people, 751 couples.
I’ve never been to a swingers convention before, nor since. It was uniquely fascinating. Swingers are a bloody good laugh, I’ll give them that…they certainly know how to party. I do know now, after being politely propositioned about a dozen times a day, and having seen things that made my eyes water, that neither my wife nor I are in the least interested in swinging. It’s a laugh to attend though ,and great to take pictures of, although very tricky when the mag you are shooting for will not publish anything remotely ‘naughty’.
We had been there 3 days before we were told where to find the ‘real’ action. Upstairs, third floor, after midnight. Pick your room, choose your fancy. Maybe the orgy room sir? Perhaps the sybian room? (look it up) The dark room? The massive cocks room? The dungeon? The straps room? The cradles room? The harnesses and trapezes room? And on and on…over 30 different rooms catering to every sexual peccadilloe imaginable. And I mean imaginable. All night long.
The pic above was shot in the orgy room, where up to 50 people at a time get it on together. Everyone in the above picture was happy to be photographed (don’t ask me why), but I couldn’t show owt naughty. So, all you can really see is sod all, but you get the idea. Not easy avoiding photographing certain body parts when 50 odd people are shagging and sucking each others brains out.
One thing amongst many that I found intriguing was the fact that it’s fine for the men to watch the women getting it on together, it’s actively encouraged in fact – it’s expected that the men will shag many other women, natch, but it is absolutely not acceptable in any way, shape or form for a man to get it on with another man. Oh good god no. How dare I even ask such a thing. Disgraceful.
I still get emails now asking if I’d like to come on another convention, whether I’d like to come aboard a swingers cruise around the Carribbean etc etc. I’ve not responded, swinging’s not for me. One unwanted side effect of the above story was the fact that I then became known for a while as the photographer who ‘did’ sex stories. So, it was doggers soon after. Filthy they are. They make the swingers look like the nuns from the local convent, but that’s a story for another day.
Swingers in hot tub, New Orleans, USA. Swingers Convention.
I’ve posted previously about ‘stuff’ that’s useful for those of you just starting to learn the craft of image making. So here’s something else you can file away until you need it. The gruff old professionals can ignore this one too, you lot already know this stuff inside out.
I’m a committed sign spotter. Signs can be really useful to include in images, as they often (but not always) contain words. I love words. Words on signs can be great things to use in an image; they can be small, short words that sneak in unobtrusively and provide an unexpected razor edge that slice across people’s preconceptions, or they can be big shouting brutish words that bulldozer their meaning into your picture. They can sometimes provide context that would otherwise require either several other images or even some words as caption to explain. They can introduce humour by way of contrast, or underline the stupidity of something/someone by mocking or ridiculing it/them. Signs can of course also kill your images stone-dead if they are wholly inappropriate; and their ability to date an image can either be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on use.
I’ve always wanted to photograph the Lairg Lamb Sale – the biggest one-day lamb sale in Europe with over 30,000 animals going through the sale ring in a single day, with non-stop buying going on at a rapid pace with a team of auctioneers doing a shouting relay. Its impressive stuff, visually and aurally.
But like so many aspect of rural life, events like these are not just about selling animals, they’re about people, about revisiting old acquaintances, meeting new ones and sharing moans and laughs about the unique experience that is hill farming. It’s a tough, unglamorous and dirty way to make a living, and its a living that’s prey to economic and political interference, and more recently diseases such as foot and mouth and bluetongue. But for those who’ve chosen this employment path its more than just a job, it’s a way of life that requires commitment and a degree of sacrifice. Not for the faint hearted that’s for sure.
After several years of missing the event because of other commitments I finally managed a visit. I’d an open mind about what I wanted to do but was certain that I wanted to show the human face of this event as much as the animals, and with plenty of people, ‘characters’, sure to be there I was confident of finding suitable images. And as I walked in to the event I spotted a livestock transporter bringing in another flock to be offloaded and herded through to the holding pens, and then eventually to the auction ring. One of dozens of such trucks that would do this on the day, both dropping off and collecting their living cargo, in a carefully orchestrated and well controlled operation.
And I immediately spotted a lovely ‘sign’ that would make a perfect opening image. The trailer had ‘livestock’ emblazoned along the side, but I realized that judicious cropping would reduce this to ‘lives’, and it just required me to wait until a sheep or two peeked out to see what was happening, and I’d maybe get the shot. So I waited. And they did.
But individual words too can have power, even the very simple ones: ‘LIVESTOCK’ says exactly what it is, but ‘LIVES’ tells us far more precisely why it matters.
Find interesting people who are passionate talkers about said story.
Take said person somewhere quiet where you can sit down and have a chat for 10 minutes.
Pay close attention to background noise and sounds such as air conditioning, trains, sirens, echoes etc. Try to minimise them by choice of environment.
Sit at the side of said individual, not in front of.
Hold your new gadget a hands span away from their mouth, below their chin, out of their eyeline. Hold it carefully, don’t fidget.
Put your bins on, adjust your recording level to as high as possible without clipping or distortion.
Do not forget to press record on your new gadget. Repeat…do not forget to press record.
Do not confuse audio monitoring with recording, it is very easily done.
Ask a question, then shut up. Do not interrupt mid sentence, do not make umm and aaah sounds in encouragement.
Do not fart loudly during recording. Do not fart at all during recording in fact.
Make eye contact and use body language such as nodding to encourage your subject.
Seperate your audio gathering from your picture taking.
Put as much effort into your audio as you do your pics.
It’s plain to see that people here in Bangladesh don’t have as much money in their pockets as the average westerner. The majority of children don’t get the education, nutrition and the healthcare that someone from the UK like myself would expect to be able to provide for their family.
A recent UNICEF director stated that more than half of Bangladesh’s 68 million children live in poverty. The boy pictured above is photographed with his younger brother in the middle of the day on a street with more rubbish strewn over it than a friday night in Cardiff. If it was your kid you would probably want them to be in school, but like many Bangladeshi children this one probably works to earn money for their family.
It’s important to realise how lucky you are if you can choose your favourite cuisine for dinner, decide whether you’re a MAC or PC and earn a salary that even as a photographer dwarfs that of a family here in Bangladesh and that most certainly puts food on your table and clothes on your back.
That said I’m not sure the photograph at the top of this post is an appropriate way to approach these stories even though it is a method widely used in the media.
I’m talking about the use of black & white photographs of the poor in third world countries that news outlets often use and that more travellers seem to end up with than hangovers. The stero-typical poor …………(insert nationality here) person staring blankly at the camera and then converted using the ‘Poverty’ filter in photoshop that we see more often than a hipstamatic print.
Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love black and white photography and some of my favourite photographers shoot almost solely in the medium. I’m currently shooting a project in black and white myself! In fact it was David from duckrabbit that gave me the skills (and some of the bits) to develop my own photographs for the first time and I think it is a hugely important process to be involved in that is hugely fun and produces the most beautiful images. I just see more and more articles about impoverished countries and their people that are illustrated with black and white imagery that’s clearly there to make me feel sorry for the people in the picture/story. All it really seems to do is make me think ‘why can’t I see the original colour pictures?’ and that ‘this is another dreary story that inevitably involves Bono’.
I mean I’m not talking about the photographers/artists who decide to shoot in black and white film all the time. I’m talking about the editors who are turning colour to black and white to get me to engage with the story, when in reality it’s making me want to disengage…I mean I don’t think the photographer is handing these pictures into the desk in black and white so it’s an editorial decision. Which combined with the way the story is written and the facts are presented is hugely influential to the way the story is being told..
The Africa page on The Guardian is all a bit mono-tone today..
I was inspired to write the post after logging onto the Guardian yesterday and seeing a photograph (which is now gone…doh!) on the front page of four young black children staring blankly into the camera illustrating a story about Ghana.
It was a good story if you read it through to the end but the picture didn’t really make me want to read. And the massive irony was that the story was quite positive about Ghana’s hard work to be a leading light for other African countries and that a new investment program was going to iron out some of the current problems….yes Bono was mentioned. But could they have used a more inspiring picture of this beautiful country and their people, one that made me think they had made some positive progress? A picture paints a thousand words and if we don’t connect with it straight away we may not even read the headline.
Lets take our kid from Khulna in the picture at the top of the page for example…..this kid…
He was just one of the many kids that asked me in their best Benglish (pointing) to take their picture whilst I strolled around Khulna to soak up some atmosphere. I took about 5 or 6 frames of the kid and like a lot of the Bangladeshi children they always start off by staring at you so I try and take a few by which time they are all embarrassed as their friends and family gather around the picture and usually crack a smile.
I’ve lost count of the number of staring children photographs I have seen when in reality these children play games just like yours, in many cases go to school just like yours and have fun just like yours.
A lot of the time and especially in Bangladesh they just haven’t ever seen a white person carrying around a big camera. I mean we visited a village the other day and Rajib (you know Rajib the man who locates beer and tigers..) told us they had never seen a white person there before…ever. Now you don’t get that when you go travelling in Thailand! The facts at the top of the page are still true and by western standards Bangladesh is still a very impoverished nation. But according to the statistics (at unicef) more than 80% of the kids are enrolled in education, it’s just that school finishes by 1pm and in a nation as feverishly busy as it is here people pitch in at all ages.
So yes, Bangladesh is poor when you measure wealth in iphones, cars, HD tv and the distance to your local Starbucks – there is no Starbucks in Bangladesh… But the country is rich in many other ways and has a thriving agriculture industry with soil so rich in nutrients that if you throw your apple core out the window there will be a tree there on your return journey. It’s full of positive, hard working people many of whom live very fruitful, if a little different from that of people the west’s lives. Yes they could do with help from better off nations but I think we should see the positive in them and invest in that, not feel sorry for them and give them a hand out.
Isn’t that the difference between the black and white photograph here and the colour one? One makes us feel like we should give money because we feel guilty about the huge difference in our lives. And the other makes you see that these are real people that are worth investing some time, some science, some of our knowledge, some of our experience, some of our technological expertise and some of our money in to make their lives better. That’s the story we’ve been blessed to be paid to come to Bangladesh and tell.
Here’s another slice of life for you courtesy of Rachel Corner (photography) and Laurens Nijzink (audio). I make no apologies for featuring this work again.
I know ten minutes is a little longer than most photofilms, but if you can’t take ten minutes out of your life to watch then you’re moving too fast.
In Kinshasa (Congo DRC), between an estimated 25.000 and 40.000 children are living on the street. They are either orphans or have been expelled by their families. Accusation of witchcraft is an often-cited reason for ousting a child from a household. Despite the violence and insecurity the children face on the street and the criminal activities and prostitution they sometimes have to employ in order to stay alive, many prefer street life to abuse at home.
Espace Masolo is a day centre that organizes French lessons and cultural activities – mainly their brass band – for street children taken in by other centers where they stay overnight. In Kinshasa it is rare to find such an organization that works with children on cultural projects. It is wonderful to see the brass band empowering these youngsters by giving them so much joy and self-confidence.
Rachel and Laurens have portrayed 3 children from this brass band. They tell their story about how they lost their families and what it means for them to play in the brass band. These are painful stories but, despite the burden they carry, the photofilm also shows how they found joy at Espace Masolo and that they radiate confidence about their future.
You can SUPPORT Espace Masolo by sending some money to their bank account at the BIAC (Banque Internationale pour l’Afrique au Congo). Account: 33000670101 CRSAA-Espace Masolo, Swift code: CCBPFRPP. This swift code is necessary for international transfers to the BIAC.
I’ve been in Bangladesh for just over a week now and in that time seen some wonderful things, met some lovely people and experienced some things I probably never would have anywhere else in the world. To add to that I have on occasions laughed pretty hard. This evening was no exception to that as after three days of shooting my way through all the cf cards in my bag it was supposed to be a special evening.
Our videographer supremo and unofficial Bangladesh fixer Rajib had been trying to track us down a beer since he arrived a few days ago in Khulna. Ever since we arrived in the dry country (that would be Bangladesh if you’re not up to speed) Benjamin had assured me that Rajib was our man and would secure us some proper liquid refreshment just when we needed it. After a few failed missions including the promise of beer at a hotel in town only to arrive to the possibility of warm take away cans of Fosters for twice the price of our dinner (each!) at the Hotel Royal (Benjamin’s new fav hotel) we thought we had it nailed.
One of the guys at our Hotel had arranged via a whole host of mobile phone calls passed back and forth with Rajib to deliver 8 cans of Heineken to the hotel in the day and put them in the fridge for our arrival at dinner. The day was long and I was looking forward to that beer a whole lot when Milton the manager of the hotel approached us in the lobby to say there had been a problem.
It transcribed that our beer hadn’t been delivered but Milton had arranged for it to come now..only it wasn’t Heiniken anymore and it wasn’t Fosters and it wasn’t anything I had actually ever heard of. ‘Was Royal Dutch beer ok?’ Having never heard of it we asked about the percentage to which Milton beamed a big smile and replied ’6%’.
The six turned to eight and by the time the beer arrived it had changed it’s name to Barons Extra Strong and become a whopping 11.8% can of warm lager.
Naturally we declined the offer of what would be affectionatly known to me back in the UK as tramp juice and returned to the dinner table. I searched the beer online and found a review that described as ‘like knocking your head against a wall’. As a photographer I spend most of my days doing that already so a beer is supposed to have the opposite affect for me!
So having a beer wasn’t to be, and we settled for a couple of cold cokes, well a microwaved warm coke for Rajib and tucked into our rice, dahl, shrimp and oily potatoes.
It’s a pretty basic menu here at the hotel but it’s been good food considering some of the stories I have read including the one I found when I typed in ‘Khulna’ and ‘food’ into google. The story of two women who went out to get food and died within hours of food poisioning two months back. Hmmm….yeh that kept everyone quiet for a bit, that was until our encounter with Ali Baba’s.
Ali Baba’s was it’s name – and strange looking food was it’s game. Now I don’t do restaurant reviews but I haven’t laughed so much over dinner as I did at this place, so for entertainment value I’m going to give it a four out of five.
In the car on the way to the place we were told by the guy that recommended it that we weren’t getting the shrimp that we had pre-ordered (everything needs to be pre-ordered here in Khulna) as the last two people he had brought to this place had gotten food poisoning. I think these are the sort of things we should discuss before heading over to a place but by this time we were pulling up at Ali Baba’s.
It said ‘Chinese Food’ in big letters on the doors which was a bit ominous as I figured we would be eating Bangladeshi cuisine but we pressed on and as I entered the place I realised half of the restaurant did Chinese and the other half did the rest. I say the rest as you seemed to be able to order fried chicken, burgers, dahl…infact it looked a bit like most kebab houses in most cities in the UK with an extended seating area and way to many balloons tied to the ceiling. Come to think of it I have never seen a kebab house with any balloons on the ceiling but this place was obviously celebrating something.
We waited whilst our food was cooked/prepared/killed/warmed and Benjamin entertained us all by trying to read the back of a kebab box which he thought was a menu – very funny.
As we were no longer allowed the shrimp our mutton curry arrived looking like it was in a sauce made up of the chesty cough I have had all week (not good) and served with a dose of everyones favourite here, a lot of oil. To be honest I wasn’t hungry by now and picked away at my rice like a five year old as Benjamin tried to work out what had happened to the real Bangladesh cuisine we had come for. ‘I told you this restaurant couldn’t cook’ was the only words forthcoming from our host which I think just about summed up Ali Baba’s. I don’t think I’ll be heading back there anytime soon.
Dinner
It’s a shame Ali Baba’s was so damn random as when you step outside Khulna into the countryside of Bangladesh the food seems so plentiful and obvious it’s amazing.
Rice paddies being planted and harvested all year round, vegetable plots, shrimp and prawn ponds, freshwater fish, saltwater fish, coconut trees, wonderfully sweet bananas and fresh date juice being tapped from every other tree are just the things I managed to see on my small trip.
I’m not saying every one of the estimated 170 million people here in Bangladesh are eating well but the farming methods are really something to marvel at. The mixed use small holdings are just how small time farming should be and provide within the villages and further afield it’s hard to imagine that anyone reading this wouldn’t have eaten some shrimp or rice that came from somewhere here in Bangladesh. I only mention it because it seems to always be mentioned how poor it is here in Bangladesh and I think that is a very relative thing.
Don’t get me wrong it IS very poor here in a lot of ways. There aren’t many cars or modern machines, the roads are very poor and the mobile phone is about the only bit of technology I see on a regular basis but they are rich here in other ways.
I have never seen people work so hard in my life, it’s almost like a race to get all of the fish fished or build as many things as possible before dinner coupled with the wonderful contrast in the villages that are so peaceful and unspoilt. I think we would all be jealous of the beauty and simplicity of some of the lives here.
“Abundance is a fruit harvesting and distribution project that started in Sheffield and since has inspired similar projects across the country.
“It’s basically legal scrumping. Tree owners call Abundance, Abundance round up the volunteers, they harvest the fruit, returning some to the owners, and distributing, pickling, or making chutney with the rest. All is given away, with the chutneys sold to cover the basic costs.
“Sheffield is one of the greenest cities in Europe. It is also pretty radical at times. Such a simple, honest idea as Abundance could easily become much more commonplace” – Gemma Thorpe
Duckrabbit’s recent post was timely, as I was thinking through the following ‘stuff’ and wondering whether it was worth the time to articulate it. And thanks to duck and Joel I will. This subject is central also to this post by Jenny Pollard which duckrabbit has just linked to, and it’s really important so by linking to it here it saves my long post from losing it further down the page. Please read Jenny’s post then read my words here. I apologise that this is a rather long post (again).
I enjoy the stories of people’s lives, and my varied work career (with several different jobs overlapping with my thirty-five years of professional photography) has offered some interesting insights into areas of other folk’s lives that many people are perhaps denied. Areas where perceptions of a ‘reality’ vary, and the trajectories of differing experiences and aspirations intersect, and sometimes collide.
I think when you are a photographer no matter what else you might do, you are always an observer.
I worked in Social Work with a lovely gentleman, Sandy, for over a decade. I use the word ‘gentleman’ deliberately – Sandy was polite, gracious, curious and possessed of a great sense of humour, and was a remarkably gentle man. His ‘story’ is interesting. He’d been ‘discovered’ living in a remote rural cottage with his very elderly and infirm mother in the big snows that hit Scotland in the 1960′s when a RAF rescue helicopter airlifted them to safety. Apparently overlooked by the authorities and judged to have a ‘mental handicap’ he was put into long-term institutional care and stayed there for over 25 years. Released into the community under Community Care legislation, he came into the Centre I worked in, and my colleagues and I commenced the long careful process of introducing Sandy to the delights of life in the real world.
Sandy embraced this. We got him to try skiing which he wasn’t too keen on, a range of crafts activities which he was very fond of, but his great love was open canoeing, something he’d never ever before experienced and which he came to love. It was a tense relationship though, his love of canoes tempered by an overwhelming fear of drowning, but he partly overcame this fear with some hilarious practice sessions in our local pool as the virtues of buoyancy aids became apparent to him. He loved to camp too, but never ever trusted camp stoves though, after a ‘training session’ we’d arranged where despite being told the risks of doing so, he mistakenly poured meths spirit from a 1 litre alloy fuel bottle onto a lit trangia stove. There followed the loud and unmistakable baritone ‘CRUMP’ of a mortar being fired, as the meths bottle ignited in his hand and roared off in a long smoking flaming arc, landing over 50 feet away! Thankfully it missed all of the various onlookers, but left Sandy ashen faced and terrified, and it would be fair to say imbued with a far greater respect for meths stoves than he’d had previously! We had lots of laughs with him for years afterwards over this incident.
Having his own home, and making his own way in the community with support when required, Sandy was a well known face around the town, and he was a regular church attender. One day a couple of TV production folks turned up at our Centre to speak to me. The producer and director of a popular religious programme which visits a town, features the local church and the community that supports it, and broadcast this as a 30 minute feel-good Sunday evening show.
My exchange with them went something like this:
Tv man 1 – hello we’re doing a show on the local community and ******** Church. We’ve heard that Sandy attends this church and we’d like to feature him in the programme. Me – that excellent. How do you intend to portray Sandy? Tv man 1 - well we’ll say Mr * is a man with a mental handicap and a learning difficulty attending a day centre and then we can explore the things he does in the community, it’ll be very good for him. Me – I see. Can you explain to me why you think that this will be good for him? Tv man – well it’s a good thing to show the community the different people that live there. Me – I’m afraid I’m not comfortable with you labeling Sandy as a man with mental handicap and learning difficulties. We’ve spent over ten years carefully introducing Sandy to the community on the basis of all the positive things Sandy is capable of, and I fear that the stigma attached to ‘mental handicap’ will jeopardize that, and could affect Sandy’s current ease of movement in this community which we and particularly he, have worked hard to achieve. Tv man 2 – no you don’t understand, it’s important that people know these things. It helps them understand you see. Me – yes I agree, but people who have taken the time to get to know Sandy may already know his history, but there are many other people he interacts with on a daily basis who have no idea about his past, he’s just a man they accept and act normally towards, and that’s really important for Sandy. Tv man 2 – no, no we need to say he has a learning difficulty, but that he has been accepted by the community despite that. Me – so you think that by pointing out he’s ‘different’ from everyone else that will somehow help him become accepted? By all means feature Sandy, but please do so without saying he has a ‘problem’. Tv man 1 (getting exasperated, now starting to patronise me, and speaking in a condescending tone) – you don’t understand, it’s important that people know these things, that there are those amongst us who have problems they can overcome with help from the community. It’s also about ethics and I suppose also honesty, as broadcasters we need to be truthful and accurate, and be honest with people. Me – ah ethics! I see. Can I ask something – it’s the ***** Church you’re featuring, and the Reverend ******** who’ll be the main character, is that right? Tv man 2 – yes that’s correct, why? Me – well if you intend introducing Sandy as ‘a man with a mental handicap’ I hope you’ll be introducing the minster as “the Reverend ********, alcoholic and occasional wife beater.” It’s well-known locally that he has a wee bit of a drink problem and occasionally smacks his wife. Tv man 1 and 2 – What! Thats absurd! Thats….thats….(then silence). Me – well you know, ethics, journalistic integrity, and what was it you said “we need to show that different people live in the community, some have problems they have to overcome, and can do so with help from the community”? What could be better than the community reaching out to their minister and helping him to overcome his demons. What a lovely thing for a parish to do don’t you think. I’m sure no-one will think ill of him, and it may actually provide some spiritual sustenance to him.
Cue red faces, and stony silence. To cut the longer story short, they were distinctly unhappy, made their feelings towards me and my suggestion quite clear and departed in a state of ill-disguised indignation. We heard no more from them about their broadcast.
And Sandy continued to enjoy the experience of community living until his untimely death a decade later. By which time he’d canoed down several rivers, made it across numerous big scary peaty-black highland lochs, and camped in more than a few midge-infested woodlands, and shopped for himself, by himself, in the supermarket, all with a broad smile on his face and with no further exploding stove fiascoes. And I’m happy to report he never once needed his buoyancy aid.
And it was very moving that at the end of his life the church was filled for his funeral, with a broad range of people whose lives he had touched, many who knew his history and a great many more who did not. Come to bid farewell, not to a man with learning difficulties or a mental handicap for whom they felt sorry, but to a man who had become their friend.
As photographers we point our cameras at people all the time. We record people who have a story that they might wish to tell, and occasionally need to tell, a story that defines them in some way, the events of a life lived. But sometimes they have a story that only defines a small part of their lives, one that is now simply a fragment of their history. Their new story, still being written, is what matters and should be respected.
I think we owe it to people to be careful in our portrayal of them and not exploit only a part of their (hi)story that suits our needs. Its the things that are important to our subjects that should define them, not the things that are important to we camera-toting observers. And sometimes these things are all about aspiration and where a life might go to, and the fact is we can help or hinder that process by what we portray as ‘the truth’ about that individual.
Sometimes the view from in front of the lens is much much clearer than the view from behind. Take the time to find out, fellow photographers. And then respect what you find. Your work will be all the better for it. And so will you.
‘I was dumbfounded when a student responded with genuine tears of relief, there in the seminar, to the suggestion that there was a theoretical (ie. political) discourse that affirmed and articulated the extreme tension he often felt when assigned to photograph people living with poverty, sickness or exclusion. That this ethical unease – the struggle to negotiate responsibly the power relationship between photographer and subject – had a name (broadly, the ‘politics of representation’), was for him a source of freedom. It equipped him to be a better photographer.’
Read Jenny Pollard’s full post here. Interesting stuff.
It’s been a a bit of a trek getting out to Bangladesh where I am working with Benjamin for a few weeks and if I thought the trekking was over I was wrong. The transport here in Khulna is slow progress and the roads would keep the highways agency back in the UK busy for a lifetime. That said the drivers do their best to overtake everything in their path, and with one hand on the horn they get around as fast as possible using the whole road and a little bit more. If your still not put off by the driving out here in Khulna I suggest trying a trip in the dark. Lights here are definitely an optional extra here and after seeing the first coach load of people appearing from behind a single light resulting in our car lunging toward the water surrounding the road I started to worry a little bit.
This wasn’t the first time my heart had been left beating hard since leaving home. As we crossed the tarmac at Dhaka airport to head west towards the fishing areas I saw our transport for the afternoon. No not the learjet with the armed guard parked up at the end of the runway but the ageing twin prop next to it. I didn’t really take a second look until we had all boarded the place when I noticed out of the corner of my eye a mechanic staring blankly up at the engine. He was joined by the captain, another mechanic and another all of whom looked more bemused than the last. The last straw came for me when the air hostess started to offer up suggestions to the cockpit…surely they aren’t trained for this..’Chicken or Fish….oh and maybe you should try the big red button..’
Not what you really want to be looking at whilst sitting on the runway..
Thankfully they shipped us back to the terminal where we kicked back in the vip/cip lounge (suggestions on a postcard..?) whilst they looked into the problem although with all honesty, my confidence was low. Half an hour later we were boarding the same plane with the faulty engine already running as we arrived. I can only assume that they hadn’t really fixed the problem, rather just got it running and didn’t really want to stop it. To make up for it we must have had a very talented pilot as it was a smooth ride all the way although I would say that next time I’d prefer not have the faulty engine staring me in the face for the flights duration.
More to come from Khulna soon. I’m heading off to Ali Baba’s restaurant tonight so maybe a restaurant review is in the pipeline.
I was pretty happy to be coming in to land in Jessor by this time
Today is the 10th anniversary of the first detainees arriving at Guantanamo Bay. 171 remain there.
‘When you are suspended by a rope you can recover but every time I see a rope I remember. If the light goes out unexpectedly in a room, I am back in my cell.? Binyam Mohamed, Prisoner #1458
This is a study of home, of a very particular idea of home at a very particular time in our history. Rather than an attempt to monumentalize the historical fact of the Guantanamo camps, these images illustrate three ideas of home:
The naval base at Guantanamo which is home to the American community and of which the prison camps are just a par.
The complex of camps where the detainees have been held.
The homes, new and old, where the former detainees now find themselves trying to rebuild their lives.
The narrative of these images aims to evoke the process of disorientation and dislocation central to the techniques of incarceration at Guantanamo, and to explore the legacy of disturbance such experiences have in the minds and memories of these men. The viewer is asked to jump from prison camp detail to domestic still life, from life outside to the naval base and back again. From light to dark. interview by Monica Virgis
This is a short (humbling) story about something that happened to me today.
Mike Lusmore and myself are in Khulna Bangladesh giving a photofilm training to a cracking group of people from Canada, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Australia, Malasia and the UK.
We’re staying at a training centre in the city of Khulna, which is the third largest city in Bangladesh.
Last time I was here it was so hot and steamy that literally you would be soaked in sweat within minutes of leaveing the hotel. This time it’s more like going on holiday in Wales; cold, misty and very rainy. The local mosques have had a lesson from Spinal Tap in how to turn up the amps to 13. All that, plus a punishing travel schedule, time shifts, sleep deprivation and the sheer force of energy it takes to produce a really bang on training has left me struggling a little bit for grace.
Our group is being looked after during mealtimes by a young guy who sometimes struggles a little bit to keep up with the pace of our requests.
Last night when we were ordering drinks I passed a snide remark, to the person sat next to me, about wether the young man would manage the order or not (which he did). I say ‘he’, because, despite the fact that he’d been serving us for the past two days, I hadn’t bothered to find out his name.
Today, during a break in the training the young man came up to ask me where I was from? We chatted for the few minutes I had to spare. This is what I learned:
His name is Joel; he’s twenty and an orphan. Joel was bought up in the orphanage since he was a baby. He’s been sponsored by a couple from London which enabled Joel to go to school. He’s a Christian (because the orphanage is Christian) and he feels that the people at the orphanage are his family. Joel’s English is way better than any second language that I can speak. Finally Joel invites me to come and see the orphanage for myself.
When I looked at Joel (before taking the time to talk to him) I was only seeing myself. How my own needs were being met.
That’s an incredibly shallow way to judge someone.
It’s too easy to reduce people less fortunate than yourself to a snide remark just as its too easy to reduce someone to a photograph.
When you look at this one I hope you find a little more grace and understanding then I did when I first met Joel. Shame on me.
“duckrabbit strikes a great balance between head and hand training, it was a challenging and fun three days. You managed to squeeze a lot in without exploding our heads. The course has helped me gain a solid understanding of what comprises a photofilm from the more theoretical perspective to what should be in my kit bag. I feel like I can go out and get on with doing it myself now, it has got me itching to produce my own things.” Melanie Brown, November 2011.
Our training has already kicked off for 2012, with duckrabbit and Mike Lusmore out in Bangladesh at the moment delivering a training to participants from The WorldFish Center as well as producing a series of photofilms. And there’s lots more in store including two new dates announced for our three-day multimedia storytelling workshops:
1. March 28th – 30th (Birmingham)
2. April 11th – 13th (Central London)
We will take you through the entire production process from how to identify a strong story, to learning how to record audio, shoot for multimedia and build a narrative as well as the final completion of the project.
You’ll go out on location to make your own short photofilm as part of a team, and put the skills we teach you straight into practise.
For full details visit the course webpage. Please get in touch if you’d like to book a place on one of these courses or find out more info. You might want to bear in mind that demand outstripped places last year and our workshops tend to sell out pretty fast.
Here is what some of our recent trainees had to say at the end of their workshops (clockwise from top left: Alex Yallop (Photographer working at Greenpeace International), Bernie Keating, Amy Christian (OXFAM), Helen Dewbery, Fred Lewsey (University of Cambridge), June Cadogan):
My dad suffered from mental illness for the latter part of his life, and this put a considerable strain on my family for over a decade, particularly my mother. One year was particularly bad and they required a lot of support, and after father had been taken off to hospital yet again, my mum suggested I should take a holiday. It was a week before Christmas and I was pretty whacked, physically and emotionally drained, and did not want any hassle from having to sort out something as a solo traveler, my usual method, so I decided to go with a group and managed to get a late booking on a trip to Morocco, my first and only ‘package trip’.
A week and a day into the trip and with a few alarm bells having already tinkled thanks to my heightened awareness of ‘odd’ behaviour, finally, high in the Anti-Atlas mountains in a small mountain village in the middle of nowhere the trip leader, an English fellow, finally cracked, and the bells ceased their tinkling and positively clanged.
Apparently dejected, miserable and really fed-up he moaned “It’s all right for you lot I just get to know some of you and then you leave me, you all make friends and then go home and keep up friendships and I’m just left here with another group arriving and they all make friends, and go, and I’m left alone again. Its no use I can’t carry on doing this. I’m going back to the nearest town. If anyone wants to come with me you’re welcome.” It was painfully obvious that our perception of this guiding lark as being some idyllic traveling life was in fact for him some form of torture and one which was having a serious effect on his mental equilibrium.
No amount of talking was going to change his mind, he was intent on being off, to anywhere but here. But a few of the group said they’d prefer to stay in the mountains, so the group split with the majority going with him. I opted to stay and continue to follow the advertised schedule which I had been delighted with, and which included several more days in what I considered to be an utterly entrancing mountain landscape high above the desert. Leaving us with instructions to meet in a few days time, our guide departed, and accompanied by several adults I was confident he was in no danger of any sort so I wished them well as they departed.
Left alone halfway up the side of a mountain in a little village might not be everyone’s cup of tea but it was a lovely place with amazingly friendly people, and although they were very polite, they had kept their distance from us, particularly the young women. A few hours after the main group and guide departed I took a wander about and encountered numerous people, mostly children, and although we shared no common spoken language we could share signs and gestures which they happily reciprocated, and they all enjoyed some sweets I carried and handed around and two small boys in particular enjoyed a few of my disappearing coin tricks. But there seemed to be an interest in the fact that the majority of the relatively large group had left, and we few remaining seemed the object of some curiosity. It seemed that the atmosphere had changed and there was a slight but perceptible shift in people’s attitude towards us.
On the second day after our leader had departed I was walking alone through the village when two young women, and the two small boys from the previous day’s fun approached me, and one of the small boys took me by the hand and giggling at my surprise they led me up a narrow path between two houses. The path wound higher and higher above the huts and finally levelled out on a narrow ledge that led across the face of a cliff to where the sound of singing rose. We rounded the corner and found a group of women washing clothes at a small spring, with wet clothes laid out in the sun to dry. They looked in surprise at me and my guides spoke a few words and they all smiled warmly and carried on working.
I was gestured to sit and did so and spent an hour listening to their singing and watching the women work, high above the valley, intense winter blue sky overhead, their voices echoing beautifully. I understood not a single word, but neither did I care. And I never once thought to lift my camera for it seemed as if to do so would be some gross breach of trust and that this whole wonderful scene I’d become a part of would dissolve. Eventually my young woman guides came over and they moved across to the cliff edge and sat together and then made the camera sign to me, and gestured to me to take their picture as they sat together with earnest looks on their faces.
And so I did as asked and when they heard the shutter click they grinned and giggled and were up and off. It was a lovely moment and one that seemed so unlikely a few days earlier. And it struck me how little real contact our guide must have had with these mountain people even although he spoke some of their language and had been in this village numerous times. It seemed hugely ironic that someone could feel so ‘alone’ amidst such friendly and engaging people.
Photographers often say to their subjects “just ignore me, pretend I’m not here” in order to try to gain some ‘intimate’ fly-on-the-wall photographic opportunities. I’ve always hated that. In reality what they should say is “please accept me” – a somewhat different concept and for me a much more humane one; one that brings with it the need for interaction, and mutual respect, and which will of necessity elicit the question from your subjects – “why should we accept you?”. To which your response spoken or unspoken, must be honest and understood.
