What photos say

Dusty feet, torn dress, beaming smile. Round belly, smudged face, big eyes. 

Closing my eyes I can conjure the pictures I’ve taken, and not taken, from my own travels. The little girl in a village in Uganda, petrified by the pale skin of the American interns- hell, scared of my peanut butter colored skin. She ran from me initially, but when confronted with the blonde hair and almost translucent blue eyes, she reached for me, clung to me, even as she cried. I was the lesser of the evils but some unknown evil nonetheless.

Part of me wishes I had a picture of that moment. Some part of me wishes I had a lot of pictures of random moments in the various countries I’ve visited and lived. But in recent years I have tried to be mindful of the pictures I take, of the stories they tell- whether I intend to tell those stories or not.

The most ubiquitous photos of the African continent are the quintessential animal/safari shots, the stark/lush landscape, and the disheveled/adorable child. And as frequently as there are photos of small smiling children, there is inevitably a picture of a white/western person holding them or their hands, crouched down at eye level or in some close proximity to that child. A clean person. A smiling person. A well fed person. And harmless as that photo is in the moment, it perpetuates a host of thoughts and expectations and narratives about a continent that already has too many “others” communicating stories on its behalf.

So for me, the picture of the “African” child is the hardest for me to take. Weighed down by the potential untruths or half-truths or full truths with no context that I am spreading, I find it difficult to snap a shot of a smiling Ugandan, Liberian, Ethiopian, child in anything that resembles the stereotypical narratives that already saturate our understanding of those places.

We are inundated with narratives every day without realizing it. We absorb starving and squalored “norms” like breathing, without realizing we are doing anything at all. And so we come to believe that Africa is a place that only knows elephants, famine, and war. There are no cityscapes, not cars- save safari jeeps, and no elegant dining. There is no middle class, no internet, no university.

 

When I returned from Uganda my niece’s teacher invited me to talk to the fourth grade classes about my time there. I pulled together a slide show that focused on wells and potable water in the villages – a story that in many ways keeps with the narrative of rural and poor African nations. A true story but not the only story.

My first slide wasn’t of a village or even a well though; my first picture was of the Kampala skyline. 

When I asked the kids where that picture was taken, they guessed wildly of American cities. And when I told them that modern-looking city was in a country in Africa they looked surprised and then absorbed it…just like that. Their teacher on the other hand, she seemed to struggle with an Africa that looked more like Houston than the Serengeti. The difference, she’s been absorbing specific ideas about Africa for far longer than the kids. That photo contradicted what she’s been taught – often passively – about the perceived singularity of African life. 

But the kids…the kids haven’t yet. They are still early in what they are consuming and so it is possible for them to understand the world not in absolutes but in shades of gray. I want their understanding of the African continent, and Asia, and everywhere in the world, to be nuanced and textured and layered. Taking pictures of little kids with running noses and dirty feet doesn’t do that, unless they are displayed beside photos of kids dressed in prep school uniforms in front of spotless cars. Without the later, I find it too difficult to shoot the former, the perpetuating harm is mostly inadvertent but still too great.