Stereotypical Stigma

An image on the cover of National Geographic in a shop here in Minsk caught my eye today. It was of a young Masai woman, with her breast exposed. This in a town where soft porn is not on the shelves.

And another image, sent electronically by Reuters is really haunting me today. It’s of a black woman in Sao Paolo smoking crack. She’s hugely pregnant, surrounded by other users, sprawled on the ground, mouth open, belly out, legs akimbo.

Later in the series we see a pic of the photographer, secreted away in an overlooking building, working under a black cape that hides him and the camera.

The series of photos told me crack is a problem for black people, and if you want to film them you’d better make sure they don’t catch you.

But hang on. There’s no attempt to hide these people’s identity. They are committing a crime and their faces are revealed. They have not given any consent to be filmed. And their addiction is treated as grubby, filthy, scary.

They are portrayed as somehow sub-human. Slumped against the wall, eyes rolled back, crashed out on the manky pavement.

Sure, the life of a crack addict is a vile, miserable one. I think we know that. But I don’t think any young black Brazilians seeing this will say “that’s it. No crack for me thanks”. Worse, white Brazilian kids may  say “I can smoke a rock or two. It’s only the blacks that can’t handle it.” (Only stupid people get trafficked/AIDS/addicted).

Where’s the public good?

Where’s the photo series of Japanese businessmen falling out of karaoke bars, barfing on the street? The twenty-something alcoholic student nurse in Newcastle pissing in the gutter? The Russian comatose in the snow? The coked-up Wall Street investment banker driving his Merc through a shop window?

It seems its ok to portray black people as miserable, criminal, feral. Or as corpses. Starved in Somalia, mutilated in Rwanda, piled up on the streets in Port-au-Prince. Bloated and floating in New Orleans after Katrina.

What am I supposed to think, when I see this pregnant woman, crack-pipe in hand, feeding her unborn baby poison? Bringing a child into Cracolandia. Blame her? Forbid her to reproduce?

That’s this thinking that allows nice white people to go to Haiti and cherrypick “orphans” to export. That’s the thinking that says “oh, their life would be terrible. Their parents would jump at the chance to let them have an American education.”

That’s the logic that says “It’s not slavery. ALL African kids work on the farm during the holidays. Their parents can’t afford to keep them so they have to work on the cocoa plantations”. Here’s a song for anyone who believes that.

Aid agencies, led by the IFRC, came up with a code of conduct in the mid-90s which we still live by. Occasionally we sail close to the wind, but essentially our code is sacrosanct and it says: “In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified human beings, not hopeless objects”.

The irony is, of course, that we have to show the picture before we can criticise it.

And, knowing many excellent people in Reuters, I know they don’t just wake up and say “let’s dump on the black Brazilians today.”

I am sure they agonize on the merits, artistic, journalistic, humanitarian. And maybe, maybe they’ve thrown a stone that hit home. The truth is there is no dignity in crack addiction. But all of us, you, me, President Obama, Lady Gaga, Prince William and the entire cast of Lost were born naked, scared, but with the same right to life and dignity. And without Fernando Donasci’s photo essay I might not have had that thought today, and you might not have read it. 


Photo rights - it was not possible to use the Reuters photos referred to but we did link to the slideshow provided by Reuters for potential purchase. The photo used in this post is from the infamous Cracolandia but this time from AP and another photographer called Mauricio Lima. Interestingly, this slideshow also features the pregnant woman spoken about here. 
/JL

Out of the Rubble ¦ Audio Slideshow from Haiti

Funny how the lone photographer, one of journalism's quintessential observers, has for so long been muzzled, leaving their work open to interpretation by others who never stood in their shoes. I am a big fan of the way photographers are now more and more providing commentary and narrative to their work. It often brings deeper insights, new perspectives to the broader context of split-second snaps, allows for greater understanding and more powerful story telling.

Here is a sample I came across from New Yorker Evan Abramson which I thought was particularly illuminating. The people of Haiti are "within their own worlds of survival" says Evan who never felt threatened or unwelcome despite what conclusions we might otherwise have made from some of the images. Even more of a reason to hear what photographers experience at the time images are captured, what is going through their minds and how they see things panning out in the future.



/PC

A Challenge to Aid Workers

HDEO is surprised, and unpleasantly.

The congruence of aid workers, digital cameras and social media should allow us to be posting up-to-the-second images of our work in disasters to our own pages, to our blogs, and to our peers. What's
happening? Maybe it’s the rarefied air of management that I breathe these days but I am seeing very little outside of our corporate websites of the victims and consequences of natural, social and
man-made disasters.

And why? It's happening all around us. Yes, even in the stable cities to which we have retreated to headquarter ourselves. Do we think our personal involvement is prurient? Undignified? Or do we only want to show the shiny happy side of aid work, the clapping families in their new tsunami-proof houses? The well-nourished babies at "our" feeding centres? The old ladies with nice new blue rinses getting a lift to the social centre from a young friend with slicked-back hair and neat teeth?

I got a gallery of pics from Reuters this morning that made me feel physically ill but I'm damn glad I saw it. It was from Slovenia, that well-known crisis hotspot. And it showed, in clean, graphic detail, a
person shooting heroin. None of your Trainspotting "oooh that's gooooood" to be seen here. Just a manky falling down shooting gallery, blue-blistered scabby veins, bleeding knuckles, lit up by summer sun coming in through the gaps in the walls.

What's he banging on about now? you are wondering. Well folks, this person is our client, our raison d'etre. (Not to mention our brother). He's clearly given consent to being photographed, knowing that this is the one great gesture he can make, to show injecting drug use with all its glamour stripped away. The end of the road.

The point, from the pictures, seems to be that the needles are clean and this guy has been reached. He has, at least, the option of safe fixing and perhaps a way out of an expensive, disabling addiction that has long ceased to have any joy attached to it. And so he won't go on to contract HIV and infect his partner and their unborn kid.

The pictures are ugly, but dignified. No one is being objectified here. I don't suggest that we all (re)start sticking our Canons and Panasonic into the faces of starving African babies or recording the
death-rattle of a TB victim in the depths of a Siberian winter. I'd rather those clichés remained rare but powerful. But I am getting mightily bored of the holiday snaps we are posting in our travels round the scarred planet.

I think the reason may be that we are nervy of being seeing as wearing our bleeding hearts on our sleeves. "C'mon, we know you work for an aid organisation, we can see our friends commenting. "Don't ram it down our throats, eh?"

To which, my diplomatic reply would be "sod off".

We "aid workers" (do we even like that nomenclature?) are so bloody privileged to zip round the world, generally staying in pretty groovy digs where we solve the word's problems from air conditioned
conference-rooms with regular coffee breaks at which we've long since forgotten the irony as we freeload up on canapes and sushi ("they're paid for anyway").

Surely our duty, as well as our privilege, is to bear witness. To what we see, what we hear about. Our "civilian" friends are not going to see the depth of squalor, the abomination of the human condition that
we get to see (well, if we choose to truly partner local NGOs and stick a toe outside the hotel lobby).

And my other contention (or conceit as my old boss DLP liked to call his contentions) is that we are obsessed with public relations. Urgh. Phtoo. Spit. Gargle. Rinse.

We are so donor driven that we think the only obligation we truly have is to the governments and fat cat philanthropists who assuage their guilt at ignoring the injustices that lead to favelas, filthy hospitals and empty schools by throwing money at us. And we dutifully round up the gap-toothed kiddies, the prettiest urchins, and snap them goofily glugging from a new waterpump, cutely yelping as they get
their vaccination and so on and so predictably on, all under a sticker of the donor, the donor, the donor.

Friends, comrades, colleagues. Our world is in a mess. Make your move. You have the tools to tell the story of the slum kids who still haven't gotten round to opening up a facebook account. Tell it as it
is right now, as you see it, before the aftersales service. Don't wait till they get their annual jab of charity. Be a friend. Be more. And if your mates don't like it, remember your diplomatic training. Sod
them. Life's too short, literally.

/JL