These are some of my favorite images from over the years. I’ll put a new one here every week, with a little of the back story thrown in. Enjoy . . .
December 28, 2011
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Today is the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents, the day we remember the massacre of the children of Bethlehem by the army of an empire that was threatened by the birth of a child. To escape the violence, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Egypt, where they lived until Herod died. Despite all the turmoil there, Egypt today continues to be a refuge for families fleeing political violence. Here’s an image of Mery Deng Makwi as she helps her 5-year old son Riko get dressed for school in their apartment in the Abbasia neighborhood of Cairo. The entire family fled fighting in southern Sudan a decade ago. Riko and his two siblings go to a school funded by the United Nations. They’d like to go back home, but Khartoum’s decision to continue the war against newly independent South Sudan doesn’t make that a very appealing prospect. The massacre of the innocents goes on unabated, and families continue to flee their homes in a search for safe refuge.
December 20, 2011
In these final days of Advent, when we practice waiting, I remember this woman. In April 2000 I was in Gubalaftu, a poor village in the stark northern highlands of Ethiopia. I was covering the effect that a periodic drought had on families there. Some had received food from the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church, but it wasn’t enough to go around and the church’s nearby grain storage warehouse was empty. So most families took what little grain they had harvested and mixed in moss and leaves, what are known locally as “famine foods.” They ate one meal a day at the most, and watched the skies for signs of rain. . . Agriculture in this part of Ethiopia is dependent on the shorter of two rainy seasons. Although there are variations in different regions of the country, the shorter belg rainy season usually runs from March to June, and the longer meher season (also called the kiremt in some parts) from July onward. Many highlanders are more dependent on the belg because at such high elevations, the torrential rains, frost and strong winds of the meher can destroy much of the crop. North Welo had suffered a bad belg season in 1998, a total failure of the belg in 1999, and in 2000 any belg rains that fell were too little, too late. When the rain comes late, rather than planting their normal crops of sorghum, corn and barley, farmers plant more rapidly-maturing crops such as teff and chick peas, which are less productive. Even the later crops can wither before the harvest if the rains are too erratic. And yet people plow the land, sow a few seeds, and hope. At times, hope is all they have to live on. . . I met this woman as I hiked with my translator over the vast expanse of dusty fields. As we spoke, her child, evidently hungry, was crying, and she turned for a few moments to soothe her child. I managed to capture one image before she turned back to our conversation. Her image has stayed with me. And I recall it in these waning days of Advent, when we remember the journey of another poor family who ventured into occupied Bethlehem to give birth to a child who would also face hunger and suffering.
December 16, 2011
Newt Gingrich paints himselfs as a “historian,” but it’s obvious that his recent reference to the Palestinians as an “invented” people, just as his claim that they are all “terrorists,” is a lie so big that only the most ardent Fox News devotee, who knows less about the world than someone who doesn’t watch any news at all, wouldn’t choke on their slurpy while hearing it. Most scholars of the ancient Middle East, including many Israeli scholars, agree that the people known as Palestinians have been living the same area since approximately 1200 BCE, about the same time as the Israelites showed up. That’s more than three millennia of continuous settlement, roughly 2,600 years before the first settler colony was established at Jamestown, Virginia. It’s true that the idea of a modern Palestinian state didn’t emerge until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of the British mandate in 1922, but then the same could be said for Israel, which was only created by the United Nations in 1948. Many of us, including me, are part of an “invented” people, but Gingrich wants to see the Palestinians through a selective filter because it helps him pander to the Israeli lobby, something President Obama has also developed a knack of doing. The conflict in the middle east isn’t going to improve until the U.S. becomes an honest power broker, which means understanding the necessity of a two-state solution that recognizes the right of all – including Jews, Muslims, and Christians – to live in peace. If I were Gingrich’s parole officer, I’d punish him for such idiocy by making him stare for days at the refrigerator doors of Palestinian and Israeli families, where I suspect there’s a lot to learn about identity and peoplehood. Here’s an image from the kitchen of a Palestinian family in Wadi’ Foukin, a small agricultural village under assault from an illegal Israeli settlement that has moved on to the adjacent hilltop and proceded to dump its sewage onto the Palestinians’ fields. Such aggression wouldn’t be allowed if people like Gingrich really understood history.
December 10, 2011
I’m a little late posting this week as I wandered off to New York City for three days, where among other things I signed copies of Rubble Nation, a new book on Haiti that I coauthored, at a reception in Manhattan. So I was thinking a bit about the images in the book and what they evoke. And what visual narratives I try to avoid. Besides “disaster porn,” which makes survivors victims and turns aid workers into white knights, there’s another photographic genre afoot that needs shunning. It’s a sort of “voluntourist porn” that populates the slide shows and flickr pages of volunteer groups that have returned from Haiti. It inevitably has smiling native children and suitably grimy fellow group members as they climb in and out of the van on the trip back and forth to the worksite. Very little of the real Haiti, but it serves as great fodder for the inevitable potluck when the group returns home, a sort of visual wampum that can be exchanged for affirmation that makes us feel good about ourselves. And I’m not just talking about church groups. A friend commented to me on the most recent Jimmy Carter Habitat for Humanity mass build, which just took place in Leogane, Haiti: “They never saw Haiti, and weren’t allowed out of the either the ‘residential compound’ or the work site. All they saw of Haiti was the road from the airport, where they boarded buses straight for Leogane, and back. . . some people felt they were in a prison labor camp.” That’s criminal. Because when you break free from the handlers, Haiti is a fascinating place, and Haitians keep surprising you. In the days after the quake, one of the more surprisingly hopeful places I found was the Viva Rio! project in Belair, where Brazilians were teaching kids the fundamentals of capoeira. It gave the kids something to focus on other than the hell they’d lived through. The instructors kept it low-key, as they didn’t want the kids sweating a lot, as there wasn’t much clean water to drink. It provided a different kind of image for me, which is the name of the game in a place like Haiti right after the quake. With so many photographers from around the world crawling all over the place, what image can I capture that tells part of the story that no one else has exposed? It’s a large and complicated story, of course, and no single image can sucessfully relate it, but one facet of it that certainly needs to be told visually has to do with the strength and energy of Haitians, including Haitian children.
December 1, 2011
In the last few years I’ve shot a lot of images related to HIV and AIDS. Because today is World AIDS Day, I wanted to pick just one. Would it be a care giver in Malawi, one of those unsung heroes on the front line of the war against suffering? Would it be an angry activist in a demonstration at one of the International AIDS Conferences I’ve covered, or maybe even a personal shot of me posing with a dancing condom at the Mexico City IAC? Would it be a Sister of Mercy caring quietly for a woman living with AIDS in Port-au-Prince? Would it be children in Johannesburg writing letters to their government about better access to ARVs? I browsed around for a while and decided on this one, a sort of quiet image where a Buddhist monk, Han Kimsoy, is visiting Prak Marin at her home in the Beungkak neighborhood of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The whole neighborhood is built on stilts atop a polluted lake. Two of her children sit on the entry to her house. There’s a fascinating protocol for hanging out with monks, and one of these days I’ll write about it here. But the point for today is that Prak Marin is HIV positive. Han Kimsoy visits individuals living with HIV and AIDS and leads group sessions in several neighborhoods around Phnom Penh; I spent a couple of days photographing him at work. He’s a leader in the Buddhist community, pushing other monks to greater levels of education and advocacy on behalf of people infected or affected by HIV and AIDS. Just as in the Christian community and other religious traditions, there has been maturation among Buddhists in terms of how they relate to HIV and AIDS. After an initial response which contributed greatly to stigma and discrimination, there is now a greater attitude of love and acceptance. That’s critically important, as many people living with the disease will tell you that it’s not the virus that kills you, it’s the rejection and hatred. We’ve got a ways to go, obviously, but fortunately we’ve got some religious leaders like Han Kimsoy showing us the way.
November 22, 2011
I met Luong Hoai Thuong in 2007 when I was photographing in Vietnam. I was particularly interested in landmine survivors, and after a couple of days of capturing images of amazing adults who had lost their arms but could still manipulate a hoe in their fields or had lost legs but could still fish for shrimp in ponds formed from bomb craters, I met this little girl, who is here doing her homework. She was born without her left hand, a birth defect caused by Agent Orange. During the Vietnam War (what’s known as “the American War” to the Vietnamese), the U.S. military sprayed Agent Orange over forests and farmland in an attempt to deprive the Viet Cong of cover and food. The dioxin compound used in the defoliant is a long-acting toxin that can be passed down genetically, so it’s still having an impact more than four decades later. The Vietnam Red Cross estimates that some 150,000 Vietnamese children are disabled owing to their parents’ exposure to the chemical. Symptoms range from diabetes and heart disease to physical and learning disabilities. This girl’s sister, who I also photographed, has some serious learning disability. But Hoai Thuong is a sharp kid, and besides whipping quickly through her homework, she handily beat me and her sister at a game of jacks. I often photograph children who are victims and survivors of all sorts of violence, and it’s never easy, but there’s something particularly insidious about how Agent Orange lingers in mutated DNA, whether in the children of Vietnamese farmers or the children of U.S. military veterans. The true cost of war, in any land, is always exponentially more than its apologists claim. It’s time we stop believing them.
November 17, 2011
I’m not a nature photographer, but I do at times mistakenly drag a camera along when I go on vacation. I was thinking of this while lying around because I just had knee surgery. Rather than remaining in cold and snowy Yakima I’ve been fantasizing about healing instead on a tropical island such as Sandy Cay, where our family used to vacation when we lived in Honduras. It’s a small island, about the size of a basketball court, two or three kilometers to the west of the larger island of Utila on the Caribbean coast of Central America. It sits in the middle of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the second-largest coral reef system in the world. It was always a magical place for me, and a normal day consisted of reading in the hammock, drinking beer in the hammock, sleeping in the hammock, snorkeling around the island, drinking beer in the hammock. . . over and over again. We had the island all to ourselves, and when we ran out of beer or fish or lemons, we’d get on the radio and the family that owned the island would show up a couple of hours later in their boat with whatever we needed. While there was lots of life under the water, including a neighborhood nurse shark nicknamed “Ratched,” there were lots of birds above, including brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) that spent all day plunging into the water from about 10 meters above the sea, then emerging with fish in their pouches. I couldn’t resist getting out of the hammock to capture a few images of the magnificent birds, including this one silhouetted against the sunset. (Nerd talk: 1/1000 of a second to freeze the bird in flight, f5.6 to keep the sunset mostly in focus, and I dialed down the RAW exposure in post to keep from blowing out the highlights in the sun.) This was taken at the end of the dry season, when farmers on the mainland burn their fields, leaving the air along the coast rather strangely hued.
November 9, 2011
Digital technology has definite advantages over film. I learned about one of them while shooting in Cuba a few years ago. I was interested in capturing images of the iconic old cars that populate the island’s streets, and shot a variety of daytime photos. I thought I’d also try shooting them at night, using a technique called “rear curtain flash”, which is basically a lengthy exposure of a few seconds where the flash fires at the end of the shutter opening, rather than at the beginning as is normally the case. So a couple of evenings I went out and photographed some old cars as they drove by. One of the things that results from this is that the headlights streak out behind the front of the car, making it appear as though the car is moving forward. (Front curtain flash is the reverse, something your brain would interpret as the car moving backwards.) One evening I tried doing it on a residential street near the home where I was staying. I set up the tripod and starting shooting away as the cars drove by. After about ten minutes, a police car came and two officers got out to ask me what I was doing. After a while it became clear from our conversation that immediately across the street from me was an office of some sort of security agency, and the officers had been dispatched because I was obviously a foreign spy capturing valuable information. They were nice about it, but they said they’d have to take me in for questioning. My explanation of what I was doing didn’t convince them, and then I showed them, on the LCD screen on the back of the camera, some of the images I’d been capturing. Ahah! Now they got it. I think they were a bit disappointed I wasn’t a spy, because capturing me might have gotten them a promotion. Instead, they spent more than a half hour on the radio trying to convince their superiors that I was not a spy. It was fun to listen to them explain over the radio exactly what I’d been doing. The guy on the other end of the conversation wasn’t convinced, probably hoping for a promotion himself, and finally patched the radio conversation on to a superior officer. So the police officers who’d caught me had to explain all over again what I was up to. It was pretty funny, and the two officers were soon laughing with me. But I got bored after a while, and asked if I could continue taking photos. No problem, they said. So I did, my tripod standing at the back of their patrol car, until finally they received permission to let me go, though they did ask me to move down the street a couple of blocks. . . As it turns out, none of the photos turned out all that well, but that’s because I’m a crappy photographer, not to mention a rather bumbling spy. . . Yet imagine this whole scenario back in the days of film, when there was no immediate feedback, no show and tell on the back of the box. That night probably wouldn’t have ended the same. Let’s hear it for technology! . . By the way, Cuba is a wonderful place to photograph. The U.S. blockade has left it rather worn in places, which adds to its charm, and the Cuban people are some of the friendliest you’ll find anywhere (perhaps because they’ve been spared the worst ravages of mass U.S. tourism). I’m glad the Obama administration is finally moving, albeit slowly, to make travel there easier for U.S. citizens. I’ve gone to Cuba several times, but never asked permission of my government because as a journalist I am exempt from the stupid Trading with the Enemy Act, which forbids U.S. citizens from spending money in Cuba, effectively prohibiting them from going. I’ve been able to photograph just about anywhere I wished. The one exception was when I had dinner with Fidel, an encounter I described briefly in a blog post last year.
November 1, 2011
In a rural village in northern India, students from Isabella Thoburn College perform street theater against dowry violence. Dowry is a practice where the bride’s family transfers money and objects of value to the groom’s family, and it has grown even more prevalent in India in recent years, contributing to horrible violence against many women whose family cannot keep transferring wealth. (Elsewhere on that same trip I photographed women who’d had their faces burned with acid or set afire with gasoline, simply because they and their families could no longer pay more dowry.) So students at this all-women’s university in Lucknow take their criticism of the practice to urban streets and rural villages in hilarious and compelling dramatic presentations. The school was founded in 1886 by Isabella Thoburn, who arrived in India in 1870 as the first missionary sent by the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Church. A few years ago I spent several days with Isabella Thoburn students, an experience I enjoyed immensely. In addition to a lot of interviews, I made a couple of trips out with student groups doing popular education on HIV and AIDS as well as about dowry-related violence. They also took me to a wedding. The students were bright and witty and, as one would expect in India, came from all religious traditions. Although it’s a Christian school, long supported by United Methodist Women and celebrating Christian holidays and offering a chapel service every day, only about 10 percent of the students are Christian; the rest are Hindu, Muslim and other faiths that make up India’s rich cultural mix. Nonetheless, they got along wonderfully. Sunita Charles, the president of ITC, told me that’s by design. “We teach that we need to not just accept diversity but also to appreciate it. There’s a big difference,” she told me. “As a Christian college, we are breeding secular Indians.” In a country plagued by fundamentalist violence, I found Isabella Thoburn a refreshing place, where creative and courageous women are making space for tolerance and understanding. This week Isabella Thoburn College is celebrating it’s 125th year anniversary. Congratulations!
October 25, 2011
In this November 2006 image, a Palestinian woman cleans olives during the yearly olive harvest in the West Bank town of Turmus’ayya. She throws the olives in the air and the wind blows the leaves away. Olives play a central role in the traditional Palestinian diet and economy; about 45 percent of agricultural land in the West Bank and Gaza is planted with about 10 million olive trees. The olive harvest is just now getting underway this year, and so I’ve been thinking of this woman, and other Palestinians I have photographed over the years working in their olive groves, in one case cleaning up the shattered trunks of ancient olive trees after a U.S.-built Israeli bulldozer passed through. I remember one wonderful evening in the village of Aboud when the parish priest took me late at night to the olive processing plant where farmers arrived on donkey carts with their bags of olives to be washed and sorted and prepared for shipment, something that the Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints make extremely difficult. There’s a lot of potential for Palestinian olive oil, particularly in the organic and fair trade markets, yet the destruction of olive trees near settlements and along the route of the separation barrier continues. Micah’s vision of peace, where farmers could each sit under their own vines and trees in peace and unafraid, is still just a dream.
October 19, 2011
Late last Friday night I returned from the Dominican Republic, flying into Seattle. I then had to drive to Portland in the middle of the night, so I sought out some rightwing radio stations to listen to. These usually keep me awake, and this time was no exception. One station I found was a call-in show where the host and callers were discussing President Obama’s decision, announced just that day, to send 100 U.S. troops to Africa to help fight the Lord’s Resistance Army and capture Joseph Kony. What amazed me (and, frankly, kept me wide awake) was the absolute ignorance of the host and the callers. They knew nothing about Africa, much less the LRA. One caller talked about how the LRA, given its name, had formed to defend Christians against Muslim aggression, and that Obama was sending the troops to fight on behalf of the Muslims. No one challenged that! (In fact, the opposite is true, given the LRA’s role as a proxy militia for the government in Khartoum, long used to attack largely Christian communities in the south of Sudan.) I made it to Portland fuming mad (and wide awake), recalling my visits to communities in several countries where people have suffered from the LRA. People like John Ochola, who I photographed in Kitgum, Uganda, in 2007. He had been kidnapped from his Ugandan village in 2003 by the LRA, and after being held for several days, LRA soldiers cut off his ears, nose, hands, and part of his lips before letting him go. I had met him at the hospital, where his son was sick, and interviewed him about his experience. I then took him back to the local office of the Lutheran World Federation to photograph him with a relatively plain background. I wrote about John and the work of the churches in northern Uganda to broker a peace deal with the LRA in an article published in America, the magazine of the Jesuits in the U.S. If you’d like to see Sudanese fighting back against the LRA, see the July 12 image below. (Update: See Stephen Colbert’s commentary on this issue.)
October 12, 2011
Some images remain with me not so much for what happened in the moment of capture, but what transpired afterward. Here’s a photo I took on December 19, 2004. A Sunday morning in the quiet Indian seaside village of Ennore, north of Chennai. I had gone there a few days earlier to document some Methodist Bible Women, and had really liked the village’s ambience and the people’s friendliness. Since I had the following Sunday morning unscheduled, I took a translator and went back at sunrise, and spent three or four hours just walking around, taking photos of normal life: women washing dishes, a man shaving, children playing. These women were filling up their water jugs at a communal pump. Exactly one week later, on the following Sunday morning, the tsunami hit Ennore, by all accounts demolishing the village’s homes. Some of the residents reportedly made it safely to shelters, others did not. The day the tsunami struck, I was back in the U.S., having just flown home. Within a day I was on my way back, headed to nearby Sri Lanka. But I’ve often thought of the people who graciously let me intrude in their lives that quiet morning. And of course I’ve wondered if any of them survived. I’ve since been back to Chennai but didn’t get time to return to Ennore. One of these days, perhaps before the tenth anniversary of the wave, I’ll make some prints and head back to see who I can find.
October 4, 2011
I am in Honduras currently, and on Sunday morning I was visiting the La Lempira cooperative near Tocoa, in the Aguan Valley of northern Honduras. It’s a region I’ve written about in the past. It boasts very fertile land which has been systematically stolen over the years by the rich. When the poor organize to recover their land, they are met with violence from the private armies of the plantation owners and the government military and police. Since the 2009 coup, the region has been militarized, and dozens of people have been killed–almost all of them members of courageous cooperatives that have liberated land. La Lempira is one of these cooperatives, and when I went to visit I took along the local Methodist pastor and his wife, as well as their district superintendent. We had a long interview with the cooperative leaders, and then I started photographing their daily life amidst the flimsy shelters they inhabit on the palm oil plantation. News arrived that one of their members had been found dead, reportedly shot six times by a guard from a nearby plantation. So I accompanied the coop leaders and the man’s family to where we found the body of 23-year old Carlos Martinez lying in wet ground amidst the palm oil trees. I documented the scene there, the transportation of the body in a truck back to the coop, the family’s grief and anger, and the arrival of the forensic medical personnel, who made a very cursory examination of the body and asked almost no questions–crimes against the poor aren’t really investigated in Honduras. (The coop has armed guards at the entrance who wouldn’t allow the police to enter; they see the police as agents of the wealthy landowners.) The Methodist superintendent, Juan Guerrero, prayed over the body, and the family and friends of Carlos then began to prepare his body for burial, putting clean pants and a clean shirt on him. Here they are buttoning the shirt; I took the photo by reaching over them to hold the camera directly above Carlos’ body. I spent the rest of the day there, photographing a bit and at times just sitting quietly with Carlos’ mother, sisters and cousins as they cried and shared their lives.
September 27, 2011
There’s nothing particularly dramatic about this image, but it was an emotional moment for me as a photographer. I was in Beirut in 2008, as part of an assignment in Lebanon and Syria documenting the lives of Iraqi refugees. I was with a translator from the Caritas Lebanon Migrant Center, visiting some refugee families in their apartments. We went to visit Rana Ramzi, whose husband Faris was killed earlier in the year in Mosul while working as a driver and assistant to the Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, Archbishop Faraj Rahho, who was kidnaped and later found dead. Rana and her three children and her mother fled Iraq shortly after that for Lebanon. When we got to the apartment, Rana’s mother answered the door and let us in. We spent what seemed like a long time talking with her, waiting for Rana to come out of a back room. When she finally did, she had her 20-month old daughter Farah with her. Rana seemed disraught, and apologized for leaving us waiting. Her daughter kept wanting to play with her mom’s cell phone. Rana finally explained to us that when her daughter had heard my voice in the next room, she had asked her, “Daddy?” Rana explained to her, once again, that daddy wasn’t there. Farah settled for the next best thing, which was to excitedly look at a photo of her father on her mother’s cell phone.
September 22, 2011
No More Deaths is a humanitarian group that organizes volunteers to place water in the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border, water that frequently keeps migrants traversing the desert from dying. They place gallon jugs of water along migrant paths, carefully monitoring what gets used and what doesn’t so they can shift water to where it’s needed. They often also assist migrants they encounter with first aid and food. In 2009 I traveled to southern Arizona to cover their work as part of a story about church-related work along the border. I camped with the group in the desert and went on a patrol with some of them the next morning. In this image, Sarah Parker (left) of Redlands, California, and Ros Ruiz, of Oakland, California, hike with water jugs. I wanted to show the volunteers in the context of the hot sun (which made me drink all my water in the first 30 minutes, so soon I was so thirsty I was ready for the Border Patrol to come grab me), so I kept running ahead of them, crouching down in the sand beside the trail (after a quick scan for snakes and other unfriendly critters), and shooting up at them as they walked past. The deep blue sky makes for a more dramatic image. Shooting into the sun inevitably produces lens flare (as well as spots from where I hadn’t cleaned my lens sufficiently), and the low angle and wide lens (14-24mm zoom shot at 14mm) makes their legs inordinantly long compared to their torsos and heads, but it nonetheless works. At the end of the day, sometimes a technically inadequate photo can be much more compelling than a perfectly shot one.
September 13, 2011
In delivering emergency aid, helicopters can be useful, such as getting tents to the remote village of Gantar, high in the Himalayas of northern Pakistan. In the wake of the October 2005 earthquake, when homes in this village had collapsed, and with winter quickly closing in, getting shelter material on the ground was urgent. Yet a helicopter can only carry so much weight, and delivering its load at 2200 meters altitude (that’s 7200 feet in Fahrenheit) is difficult enough. Church World Service had provided hundreds of tents that the Pakistani Army was delivering with choppers, and I was asked to go along on one trip to document the delivery. This always raises ethical questions, because taking a chubby photographer along means leaving two or three tents behind. But we decided the images were worth it. Transparency is important; donors like seeing pictures of aid being delivered, especially in contexts often associated with corruption. So after getting permission from military officials, who had nothing but praise for CWS, I spoke with the pilot, explaining that I wanted to get off to photograph the tents being unloaded. He warned me that he wouldn’t wait for me, and that it would take a week to walk back. Fair warning. I climbed in the back and sprawled on top of a pile of tents while the Russian-made Mi-17 zoomed up the mountain canyons. I found myself wishing I had asked him to please land with the open door facing the sun, and with some snow-covered peaks conveniently located behind the aircraft. But I zenly resigned myself to shooting whatever presented itself. We got to Gantar, and hovered while the people below cleared a space for us to land. When we hit the ground, they left the rotor blades turning as they didn’t plan to spend long on the ground. I rolled out and started shooting, as men from the village came forward to quickly carry away the tents. To my pleasant surprise, we’d landed with the sun on the open door (and the faces of the men carrying the tents) and the mountains behind. I’m happy. I remembered to shoot with a slow enough shutter speed to slightly blur the spinning rotor blades, and the high f/stop gave me good depth of field for the scenery behind. A couple dozen exposures, including a few of the crowd braving the rotor wash behind me, and the pilot gave me The Look. I’m inside in a heartbeat. Bye.
September 7, 2011
Seems like it would be simple. If farmers are working in a field, you just point the ol’ camera and “click.” Then on to the next task. But it seldom works out that way. Why? Farmers tend to put things in the ground, and thus spend a lot of time looking at the ground. The ground is down. The sun is up. Thus the sun is not lighting the farmer’s face. And since photography captures reflected light, if none is reflected, then, well, you don’t have a very good image. When you add dark skin to the equation (I’ve just been in Haiti for two weeks), it gets more complicated, cause the darker the skin the less light that’s reflected. It’s a lot simpler, of course, if it’s early in the morning when the sun is coming in from the side, but that’s hard to achieve in practice. The hardest part of my job is getting my hosts to get me out early. Or late. That first hour (or last hour) of light is frequently magical. In the middle of the day it’s often fatal. . . Here’s an assignment shooting an ag project for UMCOR in the Congo in 2008. It is, of course, predictably, the middle of the day. (All my whining got me nowhere.) It’s also about 150 degrees out. We hiked an hour from the road into a village where people were planting rice in a flooded field. My job was to capture images of them working, but I’ve got black faces looking down in bright light. If I simply shot it without adding light, it wouldn’t work. Their faces would be murky shadows. I could use flash, and sometimes I do, but that’s a skill set that I’m still working on, and it’s hard with flash not to affect the whole frame and thus end up with something that doesn’t quite look right. So a lot of the time in cases like this I use a collapsible reflector. It folds up in a case that hangs off my camera bag. In a situation like this, I whip it out, unfold it, and someone assists me by holding it in such a way that it bounces the sun into the subject’s face. I can clearly see the result, adjust the light, and often end up with a workable image. In this case, the UMCOR staffer who was accompanying me didn’t want to walk out in this muddy field where they were planting rice. He said something about his shoes. So I’m out there on my own. No translator, no reflector holder. I find a woman who’s not scared of the camera, babble something unintelligble in French to put her at ease (and convince her that I am more stupid than a rock), and then try to get down low. In this case, that means kneeling down in the water and mud, trying to keep my camera gear dry, wiping the sweat from my forehead so it won’t drip all over the camera eyepiece, and hold the camera with one hand and the reflector with the other until everything is in place . . . and then the woman moves where she is planting. So I drag myself up and using a complicated set of photographer algorythms, figure out where she’s going to be planting in another 30 seconds, then lower myself gracefully into the muck. If the wind is blowing it makes aiming the reflected light even more fun, cause the reflector has the aerodynamics of a hang glider. Anyway, I did this over and over with her and a few other farmers (e.g., here and here and here), and they were graceful enough to keep working and not put me out of my misery by pushing me over backward in the mud.
September 3, 2011
I’ve been on assignment in Haiti, and haven’t posted for two weeks. I hope you survived in the absence of the PotW. . . Haiti is one of those places where I need a translator most of the time, as my crappy French isn’t good enough to understand most Kreyol. Translators are critical players in helping us understand the world. They do much more than just exchange one word for another, which a computer can do. A human translator conveys culture in all its weirdness, emotion, feeling, and complexity. And translators don’t just do sounds, they use their fingers and faces as well, as Michelle Menefee of Houston, Texas, displays as she translates into American Sign Language at the 2008 United Methodist General Conference in Fort Worth. This is a double exposure, obviously, which I did internally on a Nikon D3. I captured the first image, then moved the camera slightly to reposition her in the frame, and pressed the shutter release for the second image. I had the camera set to do this using automatic gain, which means it made the overall exposure work out. I spent half an hour shooting Michelle and two colleagues, and some of the combinations were pretty funny looking. This one is serious but conveys something of how she puts her heart into her job.
August 16, 2011
I love this photo. The technique was simple: I stood on my toes. I often look for a different angle, and love getting high. (yea, yea…) But “high” can often mean just a couple more inches. In this case, it allowed me to isolate the boy against the dirt, without any distractions from people or huts in the background. The absence of any other items in the frame helps give it power, and the subtle tracks in the dirt give it enough texture that it’s not somehow stylized. But the main ingredient in the image’s success is the kid’s wonderfully fierce stare. I was walking around a neighborhood in Yei, South Sudan, in 2009, and the appearance of a muzungu, as usual, provoked most kids to start yelling for me to take their picture and mugging for the camera. This kid didn’t. He’d been standing with some other kids, and he just stared at me as he hung onto his spear, err, stick. When I moved closer to him, he stood his ground and maintained his gaze, even though off camera about ten feet to his right is a group of about 20 people, including his mother, and they are cracking up, real roll in the dust laughing, and yelling encouragement to him to look even fiercer. His mother says he resembles a Massai warrior. I loved the shadow, and managed to get it all in the frame by stretching up on my toes as much as I could. The fact that the shadow is “taller” than him, and makes his stick seem longer as well, suggests a relationship to a bigger warrior, maybe him in the future, or maybe his ancestors, and somehow adds a touch of dignity. (Far be it from me to over-analyze an image.) There’s some distortion, like his head being so much larger than his feet, ’cause I shot it at 14mm so close to him, but it nonetheless works well. Thanks, my fierce little Sudanese friend. By the way, he laughed as well. Once I put the camera down.
August 9, 2011
The rule of thumb in photography is that light is your friend if it’s behind you or to the side, but if it’s shining at you from behind the subject you want to photograph, then you’ve got issues. But sometimes it works to your advantage. In 2009, I was photographing Petronila Escalante as she prepared tortillas in her family’s home in El Bonete, a small village in northwestern Nicaragua. It was really early in the day, when the sun is wonderful, and in this case it was flowing in under the thatch and illuminating her. To her left, however, were some of her kids who wanted to stare at the camera, so I decided to isolate her. I switched sides and realized that if I placed the sun directly behind her hands, I got the silhouette of her fingers as she slapped the tortillas. Cool. And you get the smoke from the fire lit up against the dark background, and the sun functions as a sort of rim light around her head. Sometimes it all comes together.
August 3, 2011
This image is a testament to hanging on til the last minute. I was in Zalingei, in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2005. I was sitting with some Sudanese men, and these women came by carrying pots on their heads. (So far there’s nothing unusual here: men sitting around talking while women work.) The men encouraged me to photograph the women, and I did as they walked by, and in general there was a lot of laughing. But then the women kept walking, and I just kept focusing on them from behind. ya never know. Then all of a sudden the one woman turned to look back at us, a sort of parting glance, and I exposed this frame just as she’s almost completely turned around. I love the way the women’s arms and the pots line up. If I’d done this right, I would have shot it as a vertical, and we’d have the top of the pot. Instead, I was holding the camera horizontally. Yet I cropped it to a vertical, in part because on one edge of the frame was the corner of a Toyota Land Cruiser, which just didn’t add anything to the image. 🙂 I still like the image, as it speaks to the beauty and strength of women in a very harsh and violent environment.
July 27, 2011
I’m just wrapping up a long week at the world’s largest refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. The Dadaab refugee complex – it’s really three separate camps – has somewhere around 400,000 people, and the numbers are growing daily as new refugees arrive from drought-stricken Somalia. It’s a place full of pain and lost dreams, but as in any place where God’s children gather, there is incredible capacity for joy and love. Much of the media coverage of Dadaab has focused on the pain. You’ve seen the images of malnourished children, for example. I’ve taken some myself. They are an important part of visually describing the landscape here. But if that’s all that we see, it becomes a kind of disaster porn that reduces people to mere two-dimensional victims waiting to be rescued by us do-good outsiders. So part of what I look for as I decide what to photograph are images that depict the rest of the picture: the strength of women, the sensitivity of men, the laughter of children. And when I found some children playing in the overflow of a water tank in one of the camps a few days ago, I knew I’d found part of the bigger picture of this place.
July 19,2011
I just arrived, after four days of traveling, at the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya–the world’s largest refugee settlement. I’ll start photographing tomorrow morning. As I think about doing that in the midst of lots of suffering, as many of you have seen in recent weeks as the major media has covered the food crisis in the Horn of Africa, I think back to images like this one from 2008, where a woman displaced by militia violence in eastern Congo, living in a harsh volcanic field, lovingly holds aloft her child, a statement that despite all the despair and pain around her, a baby is still born, a child grows, life goes on. It was just a quick capture; she didn’t see me photographing, and the playful moment ended all too briefly. But it was a moment that denied the dominant narrative its complete control. Yes, the reality of hunger and starvation is dramatically painful, but so is the love of a parent for their child. So is hope. There’s death here, that’s certain. Yet I hope there’s hope to be witnessed here as well, and I hope I can capture some of it in images. The challenge is how to do that while being fair to the complex nature of this emergency. Maybe I can’t do that, but only provide patterns of pixels that provide reference points to the larger picture. I’ve been reading Three Famines by Thomas Keneally on the trip (easier on the plane than in a bouncing jeep). It’s a detailed reminder that famine isn’t a natural disaster, but rather the natural hazard of too little rainfall amplified by political decisions and economic policies that end up literally driving the poor to their deaths. There’s nothing new here, and Keneally looks at how this worked in the Irish Potato famine, a famine in Bengal in the 1940s, and what took place in Ethiopia in the 1980s and 90s. All the issues of this crisis need to be looked at as well. But first there are a lot of starving people to be fed, and as always I am inspired by the selfless courage of humanitarian workers who leave home and come to such a desolate landscape to serve their sisters and brothers.
July 12, 2011
Last Saturday South Sudan became an independent nation. Incredibly good news. Yet the new country faces a variety of challenges, both internal and external. Among the latter is the continuing threat of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has long served in the area as a proxy militia for Khartoum. Last November I traveled to Yambio, along the southern border of what’s now South Sudan. Resident of the area’s jungle villages, tired of repeated attacks by the LRA, which operates out of bases across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic, have formed local militias to defend their families and communities from the terror of the LRA. Dubbed the “Arrow Boys” because of the relatively simple weapons they carry, they have nonetheless leveraged their superior knowledge of local conditions into a effective defense. I went on patrol with some Arrow Boys near the village of Riimenze, and here’s an image from that experience. Simon Peter Gamana is on the right; behind him is Charles Gorden. Here’s a story about them. And here’s a story about one boy who was kidnapped by the LRA and later managed to escape. Here’s a photo of what the LRA did to another boy in Uganda. Visit the Enough Project to learn more about the LRA threat, and what activists are asking of the Obama administration. His signing in 2010 of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act was a step in the right direction, but since then President Obama has not committed the funds and political will to implement the legislation fully. At the same time, creative peacebuilding work by church groups continues in the region. Here’s a piece I wrote a few years back for America, the magazine of the Jesuits, about peacebuilding efforts in northern Uganda, the original home of the LRA. It discusses mato oput, the tribal understanding of justice and reconciliation that some are proposing since the International Criminal Court indictment of Joseph Kony hasn’t produced an end to the terrorism. So although South Sudan is now independent, it needs more friends than ever as it faces serious threats to democracy and self-rule.
July 5, 2011
Mirrors are cool. In this hairdresser’s shop in Havana, about the only way I could encompass everything going on in the room, from the barber to the people waiting to the large statue of Mary to the picture of Jesus to all the stuff lying about to the funky chandelier . . .was to shoot in the mirror. It also allowed me to shoot everyone’s face without pointing the camera directly at them, which can make people stiffen up and pose somehow. Cubans have fortunately not been overrun by tourists shoving their point-and-shoots in everyone’s face; that’s a benefit, I suppose, of the stupid US blockade of the island as well as the fact that the millions of European and Canadian tourists who come often remain mostly on the beaches, except for a few hours of riding the bus into the old city of Havana to buy an overpriced mojito. So they’re pretty relaxed around photographers, especially when treated with respect. In this case, I was just walking along the street looking for interesting photos, and glimpsed this place from the outside. I went in, introduced myself to everyone, and asked if I could take some photos. No problem. I tried a variety of angles, but when I looked at them later on the computer, the only ones with any magic were the ones using the mirror. Let’s hear it for mirrors!
June 28, 2011
Sorry, but I’ve been away on an assignment and didn’t keep up with the calendar. But here is this week’s pick. It was taken by me after some very cooperative Congolese duct-taped me to the wing of this plane, then I held on tight to the camera and off we go. It worked well until I had to go to the bathroom, and I was waving at the pilot like crazy but he thought I was kidding. . . . Nah, I didn’t do that. Instead, I connected a camera to the wing of the plane. I had thought about this one for a while ahead of time. Knowing I was going to the Congo to shoot, among other things, a mission aviation program, I remembered seeing in the Eugene Register-Guard a photo by a staff photographer of a plane taken from a similar vantage point. I called him and he explained how he’d attached it to the wing strut with a clamp. That got me thinking. I took with me to the Congo some extra gear, including a heavy clamp which I could attach a camera to. Fortunately, Stephen Quigg was along with me. He’s a missionary pilot who’s now working on safety issues for mission aviation programs around the world. Were it not for Steve, the pilot, Jacques Umembudi Akasa, wouldn’t have let me touch his plane. (And rightly so!) But Steve and Jacques and I took off a small access hatch underneath the wing, just in from the wing tip. We could then place the clamp on a structural part of the wing, thus not stressing the metal skin, which is not very sturdy. We mounted the camera upside down, and wired in a safety cable. I had brought along an old D2X for the job, just in case it fell off mid flight. And rather than risk my own lenses, I had borrowed an old 10.5 mm wide angle Nikkor lense from my friend John Goodwin (I confess I didn’t tell him what it was for). But that lense also gave me a smaller profile to present to the airflow than a bigger zoom would have. I was so concerned that the whole contraption was gonna fall off over the jungle that I put in a smaller CF card, maybe 2 gb, so as not to risk a larger capacity card. I focused it on the fuselage, used an f/stop of 22 to give me some depth of field, set the shutter at 1/200 of a second to insure some blur from the prop (a much faster shutter speed would have frozen the prop, making the plane look like it would fall from the sky) and connected a PocketWizard remote shutter release which I could then activate from inside the cabin. All set, we took off and flew from Tunda to Kananga, about an hour flight. I was clicking away like crazy inside, hoping it would all turn out well. As we approached Kananga, I had Jacques do a steep bank to the right over the village, so I could shoot the plane with the village’s huts in the background. After we landed, I couldn’t wait to see what I’d captured. It worked well. But because I’d put a relatively small CF card in, I had run out of storage space about half-way through the flight. So there was no room left to store the last dramatic shots. Oh well. Live and learn. We disconnected the camera, put the wing back together, and went on our way. You can see online a short slideshow I did of the whole program.
June 14, 2011
United Methodist Pastor Leslie Dela Cruz, right, teaches basic literacy, including making vowel sounds, to Janet Tamtan, an Aeta indigenous woman in the Philippine village of Camachile, where the United Methodist Church has a pastoral presence among Aetnas who were displaced by the eruption of Mt Pinatubo. I love the effort she’s putting into making the sound, and the poor student struggling with the difficulty of making a sound that her throat just doesn’t want to make. Anyone who’s learned another language as an adult has been there. But literacy is more than just making sounds and learning to dicipher written words, it’s about understanding better the world around you and learning new ways to navigate your way through it. In a lot of places, the Filipino church gets it, and the commitment and courage of its clergy and laypeople is to be emulated.
June 7, 2011
In 2005 the World Council of Churches asked me to photograph two church-related themes in the U.S. as part of a global look at faith expressions called “Keeping the Faith”, which produced a coffee-table book and a website. I ended up documenting the Church of Mary Magdalene–a congregation of homeless women in Seattle–and the blessing of the crab fleet in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. I spent a week in Unalaska/Dutch Harbor, photographing crab fishers and boats (and running into the crew shooting “Deadliest Catch”), documenting the life of two Christian churches in the community, and photographing the blessing of the crab fleet, where local clergy go out on a boat at the beginning of the season to pray for those who work the catch. You can see some of that–both images and audio, so turn on your speakers–at the Keeping the Faith website. It was a complicated gig, particularly accessing the Russian Orthodox community, whose most elder members are still angry at the Methodists for literally kidnapping indigenous children and placing them in orphanages decades ago. But the assignment also provided some time to photograph bald eagles. Scrambling around on the hills south of Unalaska, I could easily photograph these magnificant birds. It was a great assignment!
May 30, 2011
This is the reverse of the image from two weeks ago, where I went low to capture the drama. Here I got high. I was in Java in 2007, part of a shoot for the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance about the impact of world trade policies on rice production in Third World countries, in this case Indonesia. I photographed rice farmers in the field, rice farmers at home, rice farmers drying rice by spreading it on the highway, rice farmers taking their rice to market on bicycles, well, you get the picture. Around the village of Berbah, which is near Jogyakarta, I shot people drying rice in a commercial drying yard, where they regularly rake the rice to keep it drying evenly. I wasn’t moved by the drama of the shots, so I decided to climb into a ruined building along one side of the rice drying yard. I found a little ledge on the second story and eased out on it til I got to a place where I could hang on to a piece of exposed rebar with one hand and lean way out over the yard, holding my camera at arm’s length, and then click-click-click when a worker walked underneath. I think the result worked well. What didn’t work well is that after a couple of minutes the rebar decided it couldn’t hold me any longer (it was accustomed to lighter weight Javanese, I guess), and started to pull out of the brick wall. A rather dramatic scene ensued, the end result of which was that a bunch of broken bricks ended up tumbling down on to the rice and one of my arms was badly lacerated. But I managed not to drop the camera. I got the picture I wanted, and a bunch of Javanese rice workers thought it was pretty amusing entertainment. Hey, I aim to please.
May 24, 2011
In 2006 I was shooting landmine survivors in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and had the privilege of meeting Bobana, a 26-year old woman in Gradiska, Banja Luka, who lost her hands to unexploded ordnance. Dedicated today to photography, she hasn’t let her disability stop her, and participates actively in a local cooperative of artists who are also survivors of war-related violence. I like her managing her camera with her stumps; it’s a nice correction to some who think that photography is all about technology. For Bobana it’s about imagination, from which our word “image” comes. Next time you think if only you had a better camera you could take a better photo, remember Bobana, and think on how you can become a better photographer with the same camera.
May 17, 2011
This image was taken in 2007 in the Dereig camp for displaced people in Darfur, the western region of Sudan. Left homeless after attacks by government-backed militias, this woman lives crowded with other displaced families in a depressing collection of huts, yet she wears clothing with vibrant colors. I saw her when I was walking through the camp; she came out of her hut and turned into the wind, struggling with her “toob” as the wind whipped it back. It’s the all-purpose garment that women wrap around themselves. It occured to me that it might make an interesting image if photographed from below (I scare even myself at times), so I explained to my translator what I wanted to do. OK. . . it took him a minute to get it, and then we ran and caught up with the woman and a friend. The translator explained to her what I wanted to do, and a lively discussion ensued between the two women and my translator. I guess it wasn’t an everyday occurence that a foreign man wants to lay on the ground as you get dressed. But once they got it, the woman embraced her task with laughter, giggling with her friend as she wrapped the garment around herself several times, each time the wind whipping it out behind. I clicked away, laughing and yelling enouragement. Wouldn’t it be great if all the photos to be taken in Darfur were such celebrations of life?