Actually hearing from those pictured can go a long way towards actually “giving voice to the voiceless.”

The foreigner sees only what he knows- African Proverb

thanks for your response. So glad to hear that you didn’t shoot the Giraffe to win a WP! It is a great photo. You suggest that I ‘doubt’ there was a drought. But if you read my post I wrote that ‘a severe drought was taking place’, so there is no difference there, nor of the importance of the story.

The story that ran on VII said that ‘Kenya hasn’t seen a drop of rain for several years.’ That statement was inaccurate. I thought that in your response I hoped you might offer an idea of how this came to pass.

First of all, thanks for this, Ben! There is a lot of truth in it and raises many important thoughts that need to be discussed in my opinion.

As journalists as you said, it is often claimed to give a voice to the voiceless. And seldom it is done directly. Now where photojournalism is slowly developing into multimedia at many places, the use of audio is the first step. Why do many use the photographer’s voice to tell stories? Maybe one of the reasons is often: because it’s easy. To tell some backgrounds that perfectly fit into a story you shape, as we do with captions. So time-wise it could be way easier. Plus you can do it under good recording conditions and all that. I think that many photojournalists still struggle with learning the for them new types of media, how to use them.

One of the major reasons for using their voices, beside respect for the people who tell often very intimate stories, is that their voices bring them closer, they become human, people like you and i rather than victims. That is also why i think multimedia should not only combine pictures and audio, but also some video sequences… To tell the single story of suffering and hardship on and on again will make no change.

We tried that with a simple idea some time ago in Rwanda, where we asked people three questions, for instance ‘What makes you happy?’ (http://www.simonsticker.com/2010/01/21/onequestion/). It was done before in the western world, but it was interesting to see that many of their dreams, hopes and wishes were quite similar.

The fact that many people in the West/North assume that Africa is one country comes from the images that have been used to represent us. Africa is a continent. It’s a continent with great diversity. Sure we have problems. Some of them similar. Mostly we address them differently. Even within the borders of our countries, we still are as diverse. To put together bodies of work that have people making comments like ‘Africans are suffering…’

I have lived in Africa all my life. I still can not claim to represent Africa in my work. My work is always about the people affected at the time and even then, I try to present them in ways that show them in whole. I don’t sit around and wait for them to show their sadness, I capture them laughing like people do sometimes even when going through hard times and capture them sad too. I try to stay as close as possible to the truth. In my work I always hope that after they overcome their problems, if they ever come across their images of their hard times, they are not ashamed of looking like pitiful creatures but human beings with dignity.

I know a foreign photographer who publicly tells people that when photographing children, if they are being cheeky and smiling, he makes a mean face at them which then has the children having sad or scared looks in his photographs. What is wrong with children smiling or being cheeky. That is how most African children are. Always smiling at visitors even when they aren’t photographers.

As we discuss this, The pan African media conference going on in Nairobi has all attending echoing these sentiments. There’s talk of there being ‘an African Aljazeera’ that will reflect Africa to the world for what Africa is.

As he suggests, Nachtwey’s work on TB is all too typical of as certain sort of contemporary photojournalism. Black- and brown-skinned people are relentlessly depicted as abject victims, incapable of responding creatively to their plight.

A broader and more inclusive view of XDR TB crisis would show that many people with the disease are their own best advocates, who are organizing and fighting for treatment and resources.

Like much reporting about the developing world, Nachtwey’s story is not so much wrong as it is massively incomplete.

Thank you to inform me about the comments of Mr. Chesterton on my work in Kenya and specifically on the picture of giraffe. That picture is having a huge visibility, so I found correct that somebody makes an enquiry to understand if by chance I didn’t shoot the giraffe in order to get a WPP. Indeed I have a deep respect for all the career of Mr. Chesterton, so I am quite flattered that somebody whom I esteem has spent some time on my work (even if, in a different way I would have liked), and I found really appropriate the debate and fair the chance you give me to explain and reply to his essay.

I spent 14 days in Kenya between the end of September and the first week of October 2009. It has been a continuous appointment with death (animals and human being due directly or indirectly to the terrible drought which was affecting the country). So I found really shocking that somebody can doubt, but I can understand.

Then in December 2009, February and the first days of March 2010, there were rains in North and Central Kenya even in some of the places we have visited. That for the moment, kept away the worst consequences of this critical situation. I was travelling on assignment for the magazine “Le Monde 2″ with the writer Emilio Manfredi who wrote the article. I can witness that “several” times we heard from different people that “not a single drop of rain has fallen since two years).”

From what we have seen and what you can see by yourself in VII website watching the pictures of my reportage “Drought in Kenya” confirm this evidence. But in order to be more exhaustive in my reply I have asked Emilio Manfredi to forward me some quotes of “real people” we meet, that you can cross along his article published in Le Monde 2 and in Vanity Fair Italy November 2009.

[The following are excerpted passages from magazine articles with quotes from sources on rainfall.--Ed.]

“‘It’s years since the last time it rained,’ Isaac Namudani recalls planting his stick in the barren land. ‘At night, I stare at the sky and pray. If rain doesn’t come, we’ll share my cattle fate within a week.’ He puts straight his gun shoulder strap and starts off again, skeletal as his donkey.”
…

“Not only agricolture has been affected by drought. Tourism, Kenya’s economy second heart, is at high risk as well. In Samburu National Park, unaware tourists watch an apocalyptic paradise. ‘It’s three years since it rained last time,’ explains Daniel Lentipo, a researcher for Save the Elephants. ‘The big herbivores have almost nothing left to eat.’ The situation has got irreversible when the surrounding pastures turned desert. Then shepherds brought their flocks into the protected areas, careless of the grazing prohibition.”