Working in the Markado

Africa's largest market is in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Field Notes: "The San: Aids & Dislocation in the Kalahari

These photographs come from the first leg of an ongoing project entitled: “Personalizing the World Health Crisis.”

Nanke's House

It’s estimated that every hour 1,500 people worldwide die of infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhea); over half of them are children under the age of five. In addition to these main killers are the numerous ‘little known’ diseases like sleeping sickness, river blindness, rotavirus, and trachoma, all of which shatter families, jolt economies, and destabilize security and food supplies. I chose to begin this project in Botswana because it has one of the highest HIV/Aids rates in the world and the San, or Bushmen, are among the poorest of the poor. For 70,000 years they have lived, untainted, in the desert. Now many live diseased, disenfranchised, and in squalor on the outskirts of dusty frontier towns, like Ghanzi and D’kar on the edge of the Kalahari. For two months last year, I lived in these places. I spent most of the time with Nanke, a single mother with AIDS, and her family who suffer from TB, malaria, and alcoholism. Dislocation and dispossession are major co-factors in the spread of AIDS, and other diseases. People without homes get sicker than people with homes. And when people get sick they want to go home. The San are being forced into “resettlements” that some Bushmen call “places of death”. I photographed everyday life. I found their “outsides” small but their insides very big. Nanke was better off of than most. She cleaned an expatriate’s house once a week, and sold homemade beer. People visited all day long, everyday. It was a very social time. She was drunk everyday by noon, and on some days it seemed like quite a reasonable response to her circumstances. “Only God can save us,” she answered when I asked for the answer to all this death and suffering? I expected her to say more education and more anti retroviral drugs. Nanke had been banished from the church and estranged from her born-again mother who worked for the missionaries who own the land she lives on. Nanke contracted AIDS after she was raped. She and her cousin Catherine, who also has AIDS, often talk together about who will commit suicide first. Catherine told me about how she was about to throw her two children down a borehole, when the youngest started to laugh and she changed her mind – for the time being anyway. Nanke perpetually humbles me. She needs so little to make so much. Where I come from people need much and make little. My worst nightmare is to take advantage of her suffering, and then my reason will be lost. Photography for me has become a practice, an exercise in paying attention inside and out. It is both a way to learn and to teach. It seems like such a perfect blend. I feel so fortunate that I do what I do. I don’t think I would be here otherwise. Condemned to freedom comes to mind. It is easy to go to Africa and photograph poor children with flies all over their faces. The mainstream media mostly gives us images of Africa that all look the same, and we are all bombarded with them to the point of indifference. They are stereotypical images that only tell us more of what we already know and comfort us in believing what we already believe. As comfortable as stereotypical images are, they desensitize us to the truth and prevent us from discovering what we don't know. Documentary photography as storytelling is a powerful tool of social change and dialogue. Good documentary photographs make the ordinary become extraordinary, and honour the subjects. They move us, not through misrepresentation, but because they represent moments of looking more deeply at the subject than we had previously experienced.

Thinking long and hard about what I'm doing and why?

Here is photograph from a story about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome among Palestinian children in Gaza, where a young boy tells me, “The only time I feel good is when I hit someone or break something." Ragda, a play therapist who treats traumatized children at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program says, “I can only imagine the overwhelming helplessness that invades a child's psyche when flight is impossible and fight becomes inevitable, a sensation that psychologically reduces them to nothing. It strips away their precious autonomy - their ability to control their environment and their minds; attributes that distinguish people from animals, so it makes them subhuman." Children mimic authority.

I'm new at blogging and at this point I see it as an experiment, to see whom, if anyone, responds. I don't have any expectations.

From where I sit the worst danger in the world is not "terrorism" or economic collapse, but apathy, and failure to see the big picture, which boils down to the fact that there is no us and them here, only us. And I think good photographs help us see ourselves in the subject, and they can change the way we see. Documentary photography for me is a means of telling a story. It involves paying attention, inside and out, and getting as close as I can. There is no magic to this. I spend a lot of time with the people who I photograph, and I often end up photographing my friends. Mostly the photographs I take are of ordinary people and events in everyday life. Some years ago I was stunned to hear that the total amount spend on "world health" was about 2% of what is spent on the military. How sick is that?

I decided to spend the rest of my career trying to bring attention to the world health crisis.

There are many fronts to fight disease on. The big challenge is not to send the treated back to live in the same conditions that made them sick. Sleeping without a mosquito net makes you sick. Stress and violence makes you sick. Pollution makes you sick. No job, no home, no money, makes you sick. Not being beautiful and fashionable can make you sick. We get sick if we eat to little, and we get sick if we eat too much. Our health and our planets health are products of just about everything we do and how we do it.

We live in a world where big dollars are spent selling More and Bigger and Faster. We are bombarded with info/tainment. Our shopping malls have become the new cathedrals, and most of what we buy ends up in landfills or some other form of pollution that attacks our immune systems. So we ship it to China or India where other people get sick picking through it. Our politicians rant about protecting the consumer, as if they were an endangered species, while encouraging us to spend our way out of debt. We service ourselves as if we’re the only people on the planet. The only people that matter, anyway.

We have been conditioned to go through life with blinders on so we can get where we’re going and not be startled by our neighbors on the other side of the ditch. Because for most of those people the strategy of More, Bigger and Faster is not working. I see more and more people disenfranchised from decisions that most often harm their lives and their environment. Life expectancy in the richest countries now exceeds the poorest by more than 30 years. The middle is shrinking. We have increasing population, decreasing resources and eroding ecological diversity. We have a crisis with climate change, and with the limited and exclusionary perspectives concerning the sources, uses, and abuses of energy, water, food, and air. Unhealthy environment = unhealthy people =unhealthy environment. I think it was Jane Jacobs who said….”The whole idea of life should be to encourage life.”

I could describe my career as one long lesson in the in study of power. Who has it? What they do with it, or not? In Africa they say that there are two kinds of people…those that make the dust and those that eat it. The story of winners and losers, health and wealth.

We have poor people getting sick because they are poor and sick people becoming poorer, when they get sick.

Why aren't we all out on the streets screaming out guts out???

What does a malaria victim and Hummer owner have in common?

One has a horribly painful and disabling disease and the other has a comfortable disease, but they are both very very sick.

The World is a Mess

We have to change the way we see, not how we look

Mogadishu, April, 1992 - Present