Monday, November 21, 2005
I must apologize for my silence, again. It has taken me longer to find a way to hook my computer up to the Internet than I anticipated. Ethiopia is, on first glance, a much more developed country than Niger, but it appears that they are rather behind in the web-access department.
Then there were other delays. When I first arrived, the country was suffering from the government’s violent crackdown on street riots and strikers. I had arrived with a friend, intending to spend my first few weeks traveling around the country. Instead, we ended up fleeing to Egypt for a week – hence the photograph of the great pyramid at Giza.
In Egypt we faithfully followed the tourist route: Giza, the Egyptian Museum, Coptic Cairo, Islamic Cairo, Luxor, Karnak, Valley of the Kings and Queens. After my recent encounters with famine and riots, I have to say that I had a great time playing the tourist. And I was impressed with Egypt, too – with the level of education, the economic development, the cultural vibrancy…a week was the perfect amount of time to discover tons of great things about Egypt without learning about the negatives. I guess I’ll have to save that for another trip!
So, now I begin again in Ethiopia.

Sunday, October 30, 2005
On Saturday a friend and I waited in line for two hours to see the Klimt show at the Grand Palais. Well, it’s really a show of the Vienna Succession which included Klimt, but also Schiele, Moser and Kokoschka. I enjoyed the Klimt and Schiele work, but found that Moser and Kokoschka didn’t really measure up well against the former. Moreover, while Klimt and Schiele definitely romanticize and idealize women, Moser and Kokoschka are downright misogynist. I enjoyed the show…I had never realized just how influenced these artists were by Japanese art…but I’m afraid it didn’t live up to its rave reviews and the two hour wait. If you go to the Grand Palais, I’d advise you to choose the much shorter line and head to the show on La Melancholie.

On the floor above the Klimt exhibit there was also a small show of works by the photographer Gerard Rondeau called Hors Cadre (outside the frame). It consisted of three rooms filled with black and white photographs of people looking at art in art museums, art on display in art museums, and art in the process of being wrapped, unwrapped, carried and hung in art museums. I’m afraid the show fell flat through bad editing. The idea of re-framing works of art by photographing them as they interact with their context in a museum, or park, or home has been done many time before. This does not mean it can’t be successfully done again. But any well-edited body of work, especially a show at the Grand Palais, should have a coherent aesthetic, or theme, or philosophy, preferably all three.

Hors Cadre had a clear aesthetic, but about three different themes. The strongest was the idea of works of art in transition, tagged, wrapped, waiting to be opened and displayed. A good, strong show could have been made under this theme, although I would have eliminated about half the pictures of sculptures wrapped in cellophane…there must have been at least ten or fifteen of them in the show. Unfortunately, with so many photographs emitting so many different themes, the show was a confused hodgepodge with no real impact.

Thursday, October 27, 2005
I spent the last couple of days taking pictures of cows, sugar beats and war memorials in Normandy. The highlight of the trip was my visit to the Bayeux Tapestry, a 70 meter long embroidered cloth that tells the story of William the Conqueror’s (or William the Bastard, depending on your perspective) invasion of England in 1066.
The work is a masterpiece of story-telling. Both documentary and propaganda, it follows the actions of the three main characters --William, the Bishop of Odo, and King Harold II of England -- with an eye for detail and character development. I particularly enjoyed the scenes where the charging horses are tumbling one over another and where Harold and his retinue are boarding their boat barefoot.

Also, I’ve just added two new blogs to my links page. On Poetry is an erudite exploration of poetry and the creative process. Boing Boing is an update and strange and interesting things. You can also see more of my photos from Niger on my lightstalker’s profile.

Thursday, October 27, 2005
Last week I visited the Pompidou Center’s mega-show on Dada. I have to say that my experience of the show was rather contrary to the spirit of Dada.
I tried to get the reduced entry fee – which normally applies to students under 26 and artists. However, the Pompidou Center does not consider that writers or photojournalists qualify for their artist discount. Nonetheless, their entire basement level is devoted to a show of photographs by Magnum photographers.
Before entering the exhibit I was yelled at for taking photos. So, while in the show I took pictures on the sly – simply because I was angry at all the rules I kept tripping over.
My favorite part of the exhibit was when a young boy (probably about 3 years old) began dancing on the platform under Man Ray’s “lampshade.” Within minutes an irate woman appeared and said to another visitor “c’est a vous?” (is it yours?) – referring to the boy. IT wasn’t hers, but a shamefaced mother soon appeared to collect him.

Now I will quote from the Dada program:
“…the Dada movement brought together creative rebels from all over Europe unanimously determined to change the period’s values…by subverting the very forms of language, it mounted a better criticism on a society suffocated by its principles.”

Sunday, October 23, 2005
I’m in Paris for a couple of weeks, developing film and visiting museums before heading off on the next stage in my travels.
It’s been interesting to get to know the European standards in chemicals and darkroom products. Negative sleeves are a different size. Papers are a different size. You can’t find Sharpies or hypo-check…and everything is much more expensive.

Last week I went to a Raymond Depardon book signing. I bought his book “La porte des Larmes; Retour vers l’Abyssinie” and had him sign it. He waxed poetic about Ethiopia and wished me well on my travels. Hopefully that is good karma for the coming months.

On Friday I stopped by a photography exhibit called “Croiser du Mondes” at the Jeu des Paume. The most disturbing part of the show was a series of photos from Chechnya by Stanley Greene. The images were powerful, heart-wrenching and often beautiful. But, they were so unrelentingly bleak that at the end I suffered from a kind a spiritual exhaustion that made me want to distance myself from anything to do with Russia and Chechnya – rather than confront and engage with the problems…
On Thursday I spent a long time at en exhibition at the Grand Palais that explored the history of “melancholia” in Western art. The show started out very strong and had some spectacular works in it, but I felt that the selection of 20th century pieces was weak. This was disappointing. In past centuries melancholia was one of several threads in Western thought, but in the last 100 years its bile has spread like a thin, dark film over almost all of our philosophy. Very little escapes it. This is evident any time you flip through a book on the history of Western art. And yet, in this exhibition the 20th century was given such short shrift. And the reasons and whys of melancholia’s supremacy in the 20th century were not even touched upon – just some vague talk about the end of the ideals of progress and of the perfectibility of the state.

Thursday, October 13, 2005
I’ve been writing about very serious things of late on this blog, so I thought I’d throw in this image for comic relief. I attended the Wodaabe festival – a yearly gathering of nomads famous for the dancing of the young men who paint their faces yellow and wear beautifully embroidered cloth. But, I found the tourists much more interesting to photograph that the Wodaabe. It was fun to stalk the tourists with my camera even as they stalked the most scenic dancers.

Thursday, October 13, 2005
Without a doubt, the work of a documentary photographer, or a photojournalist, is strange. We are constantly deciding weather the value of our images outweighs the embarrassment, inconvenience, confusion and sometimes pain that we cause in the process of our picture gathering.

Why and for whom do the photographs have value? For ourselves, certainly – some of us are inveterate collectors of imagery…for the future – I hope they may learn more of the past from my documentation…for people far away from the scene of photograph – maybe their vision of the world will expand through the scenes I capture…for the people who were there – maybe some of them will be able to look at what happened again and see themselves anew.

For my first few years as a photographer, I seldom thought of much beyond making pretty pictures. I chased the good light, the interesting compositions, the right exposure. But, after awhile I realized that I wanted my photographs to be more that just “good pictures” -- those were easy enough to make. Moreover, as I put myself in more and more unusual and difficult situations I had to have better and better reasons for disturbing people. “The light on you is nice” might work on the street in New York, but, for me, it doesn’t really work when facing the mother of a starving child in Niger…

Why am I taking this picture? The question echoes frequently in my head. Some of my colleagues would argue that it echoes much too frequently and works to paralyze my creativity. They probably wouldn’t be wrong. Sometimes you have to just keep shooting to figure out why. The days I worked with Doctors Without Borders were like that.
I will never show many of the photographs I took over those two days. Many are pitiful and grotesque, without meaning. The why was never answered. But, some of the pictures were different, and they mean a lot. I think that ihe one I've posted today is such a one.

At the end of the day, mothers with children in critical condition are sent by truck to a permanent clinic in Zinder where the children can receive emergency medical treatment. The doctors return to Zinder in small minivans that tend to drive much faster than the truck. On this day, the doctor in the center of the photograph became very concerned about the condition of one of children and decided to rush to child into Zinder in the minivan. The child was severely malnourished, was running a temperature, and was barely breathing. I sat in the front seat hesitating. The ride was tense and emotionally charged. In the end I took the photograph, and I’m glad I did. It does have value that outweighs the few second it took me to take a couple of pictures. Resignation, compassion, tensions, they are all there. At least to me. I hope for others as well. And I hope, in particular, that the doctors who were there might lean something anew about their very hard work.

Thursday, October 6, 2005
For two days I photographed the work of a Doctors Without Borders ambulatory clinic team in the region of Zinder. Many people I met said that MSF (as Doctors Without Borders is known in the Francophone world) exaggerated the extent of Niger’s famine. Every year you will find similar numbers of malnourished children in Niger.
This may be true, but the fact remains that new cases of severe and moderately malnourished children were still pouring into the MSF clinics in the Zinder and Maradi regions in late September, months after the first emergency response teams had arrived.
I think the reason Niger’s hunger crisis continues to elude the definitions of most journalists and many aid workers is because the level of poverty and malnutrition that has existed in Niger for several years is equal to the suffering that is usually only found elsewhere in the world during a humanitarian crisis. What do you call a hunger crisis that is worse this year, but will probably be bad next year and certainly killed many last year and the year before that? Endemic poverty? You can’t cure it with several months of food distributions and malnutrition clinics. The economic and environmental problems at its source will return next year, without a doubt.
MSF is an emergency response organization, not a long-term development organization, but they have plans to remain in Niger for at the 6 months to a year. And then? Hopefully the work will be passed on to longer-term aid organizations.
I’m not uncritical of international aid and development, not by any means; but in Niger I’ve seen where years of neglect by its own government and by the international community leave a country. In terms of human and natural resources and even in terms of a new, fledgling, democratic government, Niger is very similar to its neighbor Mali. But, Mali looks like a bustling hive of prosperity and opportunity compared with Niger…and Mali itself is very, very poor. The difference is sometimes very visible: driving along the main road from Niamey to Maradi you pass village after village that is nothing more than a collection of mud houses. On a similar road in Mali, those mud houses would be accompanied by a well worked by a pump (rather than by hand), a concrete schoolhouse, and maybe even an antenna for radio broadcast, if not also a town granary and council hall. Sometimes poverty is more esoteric. In Bamako, Mali, everyone who ever asked me to send them a photo had a postal address and often an email address. In Niger, the email address is practically non-existent and the postal address rather rare. I could continue with such comparisons…

To close out this entry, I just want to say, that until I photographed with MSF I never realized how silent photographs were. One reason I love photography is that it gives us time to meditate on a situation that often otherwise passes us by without thought or consideration. But, after working for a day in a MSF clinic filled with crying babies, when I went back to my hostel and started editing the photos, their silence startled me. It continues to startle me.

Monday, October 3, 2005
I arrived on the scene of Niger’s hunger crisis rather late in the proceedings. The BBC and New York Times had already come and gone. The photos of starving children had served their purpose and brought in the tons of grain I saw moving in enormous trucks over paved roads and stuck in the sand over the unpaved roads. But, I’ve never seen large-scale humanitarian relief work in progress, so I decided to document some of the process.
Quite honestly, it involves a lot of paperwork. For many, if not all the regions that needed aid, the government had given the NGOs census and village lists from 1984. Households had to be counted, need assessed, and local government consulted. I photographed the distribution of food by World Vision and half the day was spent registering the women who had come from five villages to pick up their food. The other half of the day was spent giving out the food.
And I was glad to see such organization. Yes, the overall aid effort to relieve famine in Niger was delayed much too long. Many have argued, effectively, that all the food now pouring in would had helped much, much more three months ago - when it wouldn’t be completing with the new harvest that is ready to go to market, when farmers could have used their seed to plant with and used the distributed food to keep from starving.
But, almost everyone from Niger that I spoke with felt that late was better than never, and if they laid blame, it was not at the doorstep of aid agencies, it was at the doorstep of their government for denying there was a crisis and their merchants for stockpiling food in their warehouses, and jacking up prices, and digging their countrymen further into debt.
I’ve seen many photos of aid distribution chaos from Iraq to New Orleans: food and water being tossed into mobs of people where half of it is squashed in the dirt and the rest grabbed by the strongest, who need it the least. So though my photos retain more a sense of bureaucracy than drama, I’m rather glad of it.
Lastly, I’d like to note that most NGOs I approached were quite willing to let me, a freelance photographer, tag along to document their work. The exception were: Catholic Relief Service and SAVE.

Sunday, October 2, 2005
You must excuse me for my long silence. I have been in Niger this last month, in fact, I am still here, working on some personal projects and taking photographs of the hunger crisis. Internet access is irregular and expensive, and quite honestly, until recently I haven’t had the time to sit down and create blog entries.
Now, I’m back in Niamey for a few days until my flight for Paris at the end of this week. I’ve had so many adventures, both big and small, that I hardly know where to start with my storytelling.
In the past three weeks I have traveled from Niamey – Niger’s capital – to Maradi, Dakoro, Zinder, Agadez, and back to Niamey. I’ve taken pictures of the work of World Vision, Africare, and Doctors Without Borders, attended the Cure Salee – a large, yearly festival for nomads filled with dancing, meetings, and camel racing – and I’ve met many, many interesting people.
For those who don’t know, I’m currently traveling in Africa, trying to jump-start my career as a documentary photographer. This month-long trip to Niger started my traveling. I can’t say that my work here over the last three weeks has coalesced into a cohesive portfolio on the hunger crisis, however, I have learned an incredible amount about this country, about covering a humanitarian crisis, and about what it means to travel as an independent photographer.
Do you remember those books that were popular about fifteen years ago: Choose Your Own Adventure? After every chapter the reader had to make a choice. Each choice led her to a different possible chapter and a different possible ending. I have been living one of those books for the last three weeks. Here’s an example:

How did it happen? How did I end up riding in an ancient Peugeot pick-up whose last registration was in 1998, with very, very soft breaks, behind a cracked windshield, next to a young nomad girl, with the back filled with sheep and nomads?
I’m not what the Peace Corps Volunteers call a “bush rat”. I don’t particularly like extreme adventure. I even treat a controlled free-fall with caution, but through a series of fairly well thought-out decisions I found myself in that Peugeot, slowly, and carefully, -- fortunately -- rolling along a desert road, through a sandstorm, on the last stretch of my journey to Agadez.
Over 24 hours ago I had been comfortably squashed into my place on the SNTV bus that was to take my fellow passengers and I from Zinder to Agadez. I was ready for a long, bumpy ride that would get me into Agadez in the early afternoon. Instead, the bus broke down two hours outside of Zinder. We waited five hours for the repairs. On the road again, we all crossed our fingers as the bus made its precarious way over the deep, sandy ruts that was the worse stretch of the road to Agadez. We didn’t get stuck in the sand, but instead the bus broke down again around 4:30pm and our repairman didn’t return before nightfall. So, we all camped out in the desert by the side of the bus. That evening I drank the last of my water. The next day I was very thirsty, so I joined some fellow passengers and walked 7 kilometers to the nearest town in search of water. The town consisted of about three houses, but it had a hand-pump that brought up clear, clean water (clean for me to drink half and hour after I put my iodine tablets in it). I can’t really describe how good it felt to splash that water on my face, drench my shawl in it and cover my head with the cool cloth – not to mention drinking it later on. For the first time I think I deeply understood all those Biblical stories and songs that occur by a well.
It was in this tiny town, that seemed to exist in large part to save motorists on their way to Agadez, that I found my driver with the Peugeot. The other passengers had little interest in leaving the beleaguered bus, but I bargained a price to take me those last 100km of my journey. I didn’t trust that the bus wouldn’t leave us stuck another night out on the road.
I keep saying “we.” Who were we? There was the requisite, slightly sleazy 'French guy', who struck up a romance with one of the young women and who another of the other passengers insisted was Iraqi. There was the foolish young girl who tried to walk 14 kilometers in her high heels and frilly pink dress. There was the young high school student who sat next to me. He was in a hip-hop group and was spending his summer vacation visiting the interior of his country for the first time (he had grown up in the capital). There seemed to be countless women, and babies who cried all night, and the men who ignored them and spent the entire time gossiping on the other side of the road. There was the kind teacher who took me under her wing when we stopped for lunch and made sure I knew where to get food and go to the bathroom. There was the irresponsible bus drive who wanted his picture with the foreign woman, but hid from the passengers when people were getting restless and tired after a night of sleeping in the desert…who am I missing? Of course! And, there was the young American photographer who kept checking to see how much water she had left and covering herself with bug spray and sunscreen.