Liz Hingley is the recipient of the 2012 Activist Award, which recognizes the outstanding contributions of photographers who work with nonprofit organizations worldwide. The series for which she was awarded, The Jones Family, addresses cyclical, inter-generational poverty in Britain and the challenges it poses for those in living through it. Hingley’s work, and that of award winners in the Amateur and Student categories, confirms the success of photographers who collaborate with organizations committed to meaningful and timely social change. Here, Hingley answers questions about her photographic practice and its varied influences.

The Jones Family by Liz Hingley on behalf of Save the Children

You’re trained as both a photographer and an anthropologist. How does your knowledge of the social sciences – theory, methodology, etc. – influence your photographic practice?

The heavy theoretical tuition of my BA photography course at Brighton University formed an important basis of my photographic practice from the start. After graduating, I spent two years investigating contemporary urban faith by documenting the co-existence of religions along one road in Birmingham UK. The rich diversity of religions and variety of different lifestyles I encountered was overwhelming and I sought a deeper theoretical understanding of my subject matter. I began an MSc in Social Anthropology at University College London with little knowledge of what it would entail but with the aim to ground my visual work within academic discourse.

I appreciate that the academic context has given me the confidence to slow down my photographic practice by exploring subject matter in more depth. I go to academic conferences to deepen my knowledge and receive alternative feedback on presentations of my own visual work to that of the photographic industry. The process of research and reflection required in writing academic articles raises interesting and important perspectives on experiences I have in the production of making work as well as the relationship between my subjects and myself.

Reverend Greg Visiting the Twins by Liz Hingley

Meeting at the Rastafarian Headquarters by Liz Hingley

How much contact do you maintain with your subjects/collaborators after a project is finished? Is this important to your practice, and if so, why?

I was initially drawn to photography by the opportunity it offers to have uniquely intimate experiences with strangers whom I would not otherwise have the opportunity to meet. Like all relationships they are built on exchanges, trust and are intuitive, and therefore hard to articulate in words. I see my practice as a process of social relations and aim to relocate daily exchanges in a shared space where boundaries between myself as photographer, and subject as stranger, become permeable.

I am honoured that people share their intimate daily lives with me and I hope I respect this by gaining as deep an understanding as possible of the lives of participants before capturing them on film. I always share the results of my image making and offer exchanges for the time they share with me, for example babysitting or offering car lifts to go shopping. My relationships with people I photograph are always made on the basis that our exchange is for a period of time like many friendships we enjoy throughout life.

Dressing for Mosque by Liz Hingley

There’s a long-standing debate about the efficacy of photography as a tool of and/or for social change. What are your thoughts on the photographer’s ability to activate meaningful social change, specifically through work with an NGO or other charitable organizations?

For me photography is not about photographing per se, nor about technical intricacies, but about engaging with the world and producing important historical documents for the knowledge of culture that recreate a distant world in quotidian detail. Photography’s strength lies in its potential as a medium to question, arouse curiosity, hear different voices or see through different eyes.

I do not have a clear answer about the efficacy of photography as a tool of and/or for social change as I see photography used in many ways in the charitable sector both productive and often, I feel, not. I see a lot of easy hard hitting visuals around but clever campaigns of visual quality can only be built on understanding and long term relationships, and there are understandably rarely resources for this. The project with the Jones family was the first time that the charity Save the Children had ever commissioned such a long-term documentation using real people to tell their own stories rather than actors.

The Jones Family by Liz Hingley on behalf of Save the Children

You write about trying not to disrupt the flow of life/interactions in the Jones home with your presence and equipment. How effective were you? How did you overcome the “watched pot” phenomenon with your subjects, so as to record uncensored exchanges?

My photographs develop through collaboration between my subjects and myself as image-makers, to the extent that I seek opinions on how they wish to be represented and allow them to intervene in positioning themselves. I recognise that in order to gain the most expressive, revealing and truthful images, I should spend the majority of my time observing and conversing with my subjects in their environments.

I cannot separate myself from my own familiar world completely and at the same time keep an important evaluative distance, but I have to submit myself to the experiences of disorientation, vulnerability and ignorance and in a sense learn to see again through others’ eyes.

Over the duration of my projects I become aware of the questions that matter and develop a confident analytical narrative voice. I acquire a new toolkit for each situation and learn to avoid overtly intentional and descriptive imagery. In this sense I find parallels between my work and that of Edward Weston who stated that his photographs involve learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacity of his tools and processes so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.

The Jones Family by Liz Hingley on behalf on Save the Children

Your projects have taken up a broad spectrum of issues including inter-generational poverty, the growth of multi-faith communities, and homelessness and identity. How do you select your subjects, and how do you gain entry to communities and their members that may not want to be photographed?

My educational and social backgrounds have both had a profound influence on the development of my creative vision. I grew up as the daughter of two Anglican priests in an inner city deprived area of Birmingham, one of the UK’s most culturally diverse cities, where over 90 different nationalities now live. At Brighton University I gained a BA (Hons) in Documentary Photography and then moved to a wealthy and fascist town in Northern Italy to complete a scholarship at a research and communications department for young artists and journalists from around the world. During these experiences I became aware of the cultural and social specificity of my upbringing. I developed an interest in the huge economical and cultural divides in society as well as the growth of multi-faith communities in inner-city contexts and the complex issues of immigration, secularism and religious revival. I have an ongoing fascination and excitement for the diversity of people and I seek to celebrate human spirit often in difficult circumstances.

Polish Catholic Chef by Liz Hingley

Fran Meckler for PhotoPhilanthropy on behalf of Descendants of the Incas

If we had known that the village was at 13,500 ft., we might have been more wary. In a distracted chat we swayed back and forth as the van climbed the hairpin turns of the Urubamba Valley, gaping at the geometry of ancient farming terraces and the vague forms of Inca ruins. Cameras nestled familiarly like a kid with a favorite ball, we were deep into technical discussions of ISO in the overcast light, best aperture for capturing detail, and whether to use polarizing filters in camera or make adjustments in post. Thus when we arrived at Acchanta Village with technical details swirling in our heads, and were met by a group of kids, then women, in a rainbow of glorious fabrics, beautiful smiles, and an equal curiosity to know and engage, it is no surprise that I, for one, nearly passed out. Welcome to the Andes, and pass that coco tea!

Phil Halperin for PhotoPhilanthropy on behalf of Descendants of the Incas

Leslie Walker Burlock for PhotoPhilanthropy on behalf of Descendants of the Incas

Nancy Farese for PhotoPhilanthropy on behalf of Descendants of the Incas

We are on a PhotoPhilanthropy workshop in Peru led by National Geographic photographer Chris Rainier. We acclimatized in the soaring altitude of Cusco, shooting Inca ruins, local markets and the Fiesta de la Cruz, a real bonus. Every night we recap over Pisco Sours. However, our real purpose is to hone our skills in the use of photography as a social tool, and Nilda Calanaupa, Director of Descendants of the Incas, is our guide.

Sally Ward for PhotoPhilanthropy on behalf of Descendants of the Incas

It is immediately apparent that Nilda is A Woman Who Gets Things Done, and she is as comfortable with a PowerPoint presentation as she is trekking the high Andean villages monitoring textile quality and delivering bananas to children who have no fresh fruit in their diets. The Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco has harnessed the power of 600 weavers, organized co-opts and created distribution with a dual goal of reestablishing a craft practiced for more than 2000 years and improving the economy in the 10 participating villages. The work of Nilda’s organization has positioned Peru as one of the finest textile producers in the world, and she travels to the US to promote both their goods and their social development methodology.

Sally Ward for PhotoPhilanthropy on behalf of Descendants of the Incas

Phil Halperin for PhotoPhilanthropy on behalf of Descendants of the Incas

Fran Meckler for PhotoPhilanthropy on behalf of Descendants of the Incas

Our work is to create powerful visual tools for Nilda to tell her story. Chris is the expert, and he stages shoots, suggests compositions, and keeps everyone productive as our heads spin with the altitude and the swarms of ruddy-cheeked kids who peek at us behind skirts but will sit with a serious gaze and stare intently back into our lens. Once again, I am reminded of the value of my camera to take me places I Don’t Otherwise Belong, as Susan Meiselas has said. This week we’ve found ourselves playing soccer with a giggling group of teen girls sheltered by wonderful hats that look like sunflowers; smiling with a 16-year-old girl with a tiny baby on her back weaving a cloth that will take her 45 days to complete; admiring the skills of Nilda as she improves the lives of so many through quiet, remarkable leadership. We can’t lead these people away from precipitous poverty, but we can add our photography to support Nilda while she does.

Nancy Farese for PhotoPhilanthropy

Photo by Nancy Farese

I just saw a photo in the news from last week in Hebron; it is shadowed black with violence and fear. Your eye immediately finds the only touch of bright light, a flaming weapon (a rock? a bomb?) that a young presumably Palestinian boy is throwing at an Israeli soldier; yet another day of violence in the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. Hebron is the home of the Tomb of the Ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, and is considered sacred by the three religions that derive from their lineage – Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It is one of the most contentious places on earth.

I was in Hebron last week photographing too. My image from Hebron is a bleached, desert brown. Your eye finds first the two armed Israeli soldiers, strangely almost sophomoric with the attention from the cameras. Then your eye goes to a large traffic safety mirror showing an empty street colored still more barren, empty brown. We are in the “sterilized zone” of Hebron, meaning that the Palestinians who have lived here for generations, built markets and communities here, are allowed in only at gunpoint.

Photo by Nancy Farese

Two images and two narratives, of the same place, possibly on the same day. As I begin to understand the complexity of Hebron, the dark image bothers me because it caters so completely to our inclination to simplify complexity to a good vs. evil dichotomy. In the US we are far away and trying to make sense of a muddy situation, so we simplify our narratives to good guys vs. bad guys, black vs. white. After 10 days in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, all I can see are the many colors of grey, representing the many unanswerable questions of this region.

Photo by Nancy Farese

I know that the Israeli settlers are here because they claim the Land of Judea, settled by their ancestors Abraham and Sara. I know that the Israeli Military is here because they are duty-bound to protect Israeli settlers, wherever they might be. I know that the Palestinians are here because they honor the same ancestors, and have farmed the lands of Hebron for many centuries. I am here to try to understand the shades of anger, the toll on human lives, and the role an individual can play as a small piece of the peace discussion. There is no peace without empathy; there is no empathy without understanding.

Photo by Nancy Farese

So my narrative becomes the many colors of grey. I see the weapons and the bleakness of destroyed community, and I see the cheery colors of a hopscotch board for the Settler children’s play. I see the red and green national colors of the angry Arabic graffiti on the walls, and I hear from an Israeli/American father who is nervous but proud of his son who has just joined the military, is working the check points, and is playing his part in Zionism. The complexity grows as the narratives build, and are as varied as human lives. Absolutely nothing here is black and white, and it seems wrong to portray it as such.

Photo by Nancy Farese

The photographer Annie Griffiths describes the inclination to limit our visual narrative to the sensational and most shocking as the “the easy image;” she maintains that it is much harder to tell the complexity of the human truth. Our challenge as photographers is to move beyond the obvious image and look harder for the complex human narrative; it is always there. Our challenge as viewers is to be willing to read the grey, and to see the complexity of the human narrative in all its colors.

The courage to take a step towards the suffering of others is not to be taken for granted. There is no peace without empathy. Dalia Landau, author of The Lemon Tree.

Photo by Nancy Farese

Photo by Nancy Farese

Photo by Nancy Farese

Photo by Nancy Farese

Photo by Nancy Farese

Photo by Nancy Farese

Photo by Nancy Farese

It is a happy talent to know how to play. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Photo by Nancy Farese

I have come to India to photograph play. Magic Bus India, an international NGO working in 10 states in India and involving 250,000 children, uses the natural inclination for play and laughter to bring children into a nurturing mentorship that teaches, nudges, and encourages them to enact behaviors that will break the cycle of poverty for them as slum children of India. However lofty that goal, because we are in India, our experience starts with cows.

Photo by Nancy Farese

As we drive into Bhalaswa Resettlement Community we see beautiful reflections on the water with cows peacefully grazing the edges of the lake, bucolic amidst the chaos of every form of motorized and human transport flying past. It is only as we come closer that we realize that this is stagnant water, the cows graze in garbage, and many of the families are making livelihoods from the sorting and reselling the garbage. This is an informal community of 4200 forcibly displaced by the government 12 years ago and recreated here, next to the garbage dump swarming with birds that feed off the waste. This is where the Magic Bus kids are living, playing, and thriving.

Photo by Nancy Farese

Photo by Nancy Farese

Across an open field the cows wander, along with the goats, the dogs, the bicycles and the cricket players, and it is here that Magic Bus is involved in serious play.  The games are designed to evoke laughter and physicality, but also teach hygiene, gender equity, teamwork and leadership.  Teen volunteers who have come up through the program model leadership and values for the younger kids, and the skills they learn as liaisons with parents and community members instills maturity and responsibility that translates well in the workplace. Ultimately, Magic Bus is focused on “childhood to livelihood,” giving kids the skills they need to transition through young adulthood with stability and choices going into the workforce. Magic Bus applies a rigorous set of metrics to measure their impact around educational performance, participation and leadership by both genders, and demonstrated healthy behavior practices like washing hands and boiling drinking water. They do their work with the support of an admirable roster of both public and private partners.

Photo by Nancy Farese

Personally, I am intrigued with the power of play to heal and create a positive force in peoples’ lives, and the NGOs that are systematically using play to drive change. Of particular interest are those that use play therapies to promote both healthy psycho-social development to change destructive patterns and in post-crisis situations such as abuse or conflict situations. Every culture plays, and understands play as a tool for healthy social and emotional development, for relaxation, learning and peace. Play is a way of trying out certain behaviors both physical and emotional, and of building strong and cohesive community values. I am interested in exploring this photographically on a global scale, and have begun in India to document  how Magic Bus puts this into practice.

Photo by Nancy Farese

Photo by Nancy Farese

So back to the cows… the reverence for the cow in India stems from one of the favorite gods, Ganesh, who is a cowherd. Likewise, deeply imbedded in Indian culture is a profound respect for every living thing, so as we watch traffic bend and rickshaws flow around the cows, the dogs and the children, I think of the quote “There are thousands of lives in one single life” from Swami Prajnanpad. Each life matters, and every big change starts small. In Bhalaswa the work of Magic Bus honors Hindu and Muslim, boys and girls, parents and teachers. The goal is to raise up the entire community — one child at a time. Every life is respected; every path is supported. Magic Bus is starting with 900 single lives in this community, 85,000 in greater Delhi, and intends to touch one million lives across India by 2015; thousands of lives, starting with one single life.

Photo by Nancy Farese

By Margaret Aguirre, Director of Global Communications for International Medical Corps

It is a spectacular moment when a photo brings you to tears. This happened to me multiple times while judging this year’s entries for the PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards. Many such images and stories were the ones that we ultimately chose as finalists and winners – but many other stunning essays did not make the cut, a testament to the strength of the submissions.

Photo by Kai Löffelbein for Society for Community Organization

Kai Loffelbein’s Hidden Hong Kong, winner of the Student category, is one that left me agape. This portrait of a tragedy I knew nothing about took me directly inside the pitiful, inhuman cages that were the homes of Hong Kong’s urban dispossessed. Loffelbein’s images opened my eyes to a silent crisis – an intimate, quiet suffering of people whose poverty forces them to live in tiny metal boxes as domiciles. I saw crushing, hopelessness, like in the distant gaze of an elderly man crouched in his tiny home. My colleague Alexa disagreed – she saw great hope in how these individuals created home and hearth amidst dire circumstances. In the end, Loffelbein expertly pulled depth and scope out of this claustrophobic environment, showing the inhabitants’ bodies crumpled into so many hundreds of spaces, stacked on top of each other, crammed into a non-descript high-rise, which itself was lost in a sprawling metropolis. Who knew this situation even existed? Does anyone care? Scarily, the answer might remain “no” without artists like Loffelbein, who provide a megaphone when a tree falls in the forest. For his charitable organization, Society for Community Organization, it’s a megaphone that can translate into change.

Photo by Gwenn Dubourthoumieu on behalf of The Carter Center

Then there is another kind of essay – the upending of a well-worn narrative into something brand new. Gwenn Dubourthoumieu tackled familiar terrain, the subject of conflict minerals in eastern Congo, with his sensational piece The Copper Eaters (a finalist in the Professional category). He found a new way to illuminate. With 10 powerful, beautifully choreographed photos, he showed the “root to the fruit,” a soup-to-nuts depiction of this deeply complex crisis: the laborers, nursing mothers, families who suffer daily in the copper mines – as well as the wealthy entrepreneurs and Belgian “colonists” who benefit handsomely off the backs of their countrymen’s toil and suffering. Having been to Congo many times, I have seen numerous depictions of the suffering of its people. But Dubourthoumieu’s image of a Congolese woman, knee-deep in the water, sorting and washing the ore, took my breath away. It was so simple, so beautiful, her eyes, the scenery – a single photo that is intimate and at the same time expansive. The mark of a master storyteller is the ability to synthesize the complicated into something understandable and powerful. Dubourthoumieu achieved that to exquisite effect.

Photo by Alvaro Laiz on behalf of NACWOLA

There were also sensational essays that were not chosen as winners or finalists. As a judge, it was difficult to see them not make the cut. Alvaro Laiz’s Memory Books revealed the desperate need of HIV parents in northern Uganda to ensure an enduring legacy for their children, to ensure that their stories and their love survive, even after they die. You could see so acutely in these women’s eyes, the pride, the strength of family and history, the fear of the future, the crushing sadness. Their faces said: “This is my story.” “These are my children.” “What will tomorrow bring?” I gazed at the mournful image of Betty and her son Emmanuel, both infected with HIV. Betty cradled one antiretroviral pill in her open palm, while Emmanuel reached out to touch his mommy’s shoulder. One pill only, for mother and child, both carrying a deadly disease. The resignation on her face was heartbreaking. I felt I was in the room with them. That is a photographic gift. So why was this essay not chosen? What was missing? The images themselves were stunning. But for instance one interior shot of a boy reading was over-treated, oversaturated. It didn’t mesh with the others. My colleague, Denise, felt – and I agreed – that another photographer, Alejandro Chaskielberg, more effectively captured that starkly saturated look with his essay Turkana. Chaskielberg’s essay, sadly, did not make the cut either.

Photo by Alejandro Chaskielberg on behalf of Oxfam GB

That is how incredibly high the bar was set. Extraordinary images were just part of the equation. These photographers had to also create a cohesive narrative, taking the viewer from point A, to B, to C, telling a story in the most powerful way possible. No room for error, no room for one weak image that does not further the story. In addition to all that, the photographer had to make me care about the work of the charity, spur me to action, tell a tale of crisis that needs immediate attention. These requirements all make for a tall order. Our winners achieved that, and more.

I was tremendously honored to have the chance to view their work. And to do so in the scintillating company of such talented judges: Alexa Dilworth, Denise Wolff, John Isaac, and Phil Borges, as well as the PhotoPhilanthropy staff. Their deep humanity and wicked humor were unforgettable. So were the images that brought us together.

Links:

PhotoPhilanthropy

2012 Activist Awards Winners

Photos as Philanthropy

What Does Poverty Look Like?

By Alexa Dilworth, Publishing Director and Senior Editor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS).

How does a photographer create a body of work that viewers can really see, take in with an awakened sensibility, and be engaged enough with to act, to answer a call to action?

This past weekend I participated as a judge, along with Margaret Aguirre, Phil Borges, John Isaac, and Denise Wolff, for PhotoPhilanthropy’s 2012 Activist Awards. PhotoPhilanthropy champions “social change, one photo at a time.” As judges we were looking for “photo essays that visually articulate the mission of a nonprofit organization in a compelling manner” in three categories: student, amateur, and professional.

What makes for a successful series of images that represent the interests of an NGO, the agent, as well as a photographer, the artist?

Photo by Giovanni Cocco on behalf of Friends of Decani

The above questions were going through my mind as we looked, and looked again, at the essays (of ten photos each) to get down to a winner and two finalists in each category. In the case of the professional winner, particularly, I found it incredibly hard to select one photographer even after we’d narrowed the field to three essays. And along the way, in the service of reaching consensus, the individual judges had to give up personal favorites—for instance, one of my favorite bodies of work (“Orthodox in Kosovo—Life Under Siege” by Giovanni Cocco for the NGO Friends of Decani) was on something I knew nothing about and that made me feel like I “got it,” meaning I felt that I sensed the complications, precariousness, urgency in the life of the people pictured, both priests and parishioners. Cocco’s best images were painterly in composition and cinematic in impact.

While the range of the essays, in content and style, was incredibly varied, and the pressing, of-this-very-moment, work of the NGOs represented in vital and evocative ways, I sometimes found it hard to stay emotionally available, awake to images, engaged with subjects, when looking at 12 student, 27 amateur, and 42 professional bodies of work within the broader context of being barraged by media representations of disaster (poverty, famine, war, climate change), as we all are, and of making a living as an editor and reviewer of documentary photographs.

I started to wonder about the essays that pulled me out of the (seemingly) simple act of regarding photographs and into a more emotional and reflective engagement with the people and environments pictured. There were essays made up of forceful and adept single images, but they lacked the compositional flow and narrative arc of images that are connected by structure in every sense. There was something especially compelling about essays that alluded to the past while pointing to a way out, as one of my fellow judges put it—stories that showed that intervention and aid could make a tangible difference in people’s lives, that were held together by a subdued but palpable hopefulness in the possibility of change because one could see concrete ways to help through action (giving, working). So how to craft a powerful, effective, thought-provoking, attitude-shifting body of work (in this case, out of ten lonely photographs) that can be heard and felt, to switch metaphors, amidst all the noise of visual media?

Photo by Liz Hingley on behalf of Save The Children

This is all a rather long way of getting to the body of work that provoked me to carefully consider some of my assumptions about poverty and what it looks/“should” look like, the Professional Grand Prize–winning essay “The Jones Family” by Liz Hingley for Save the Children. The statement that accompanied the essay sums up the story of the photos this way, “The Jones Family—two parents and seven children—are living in their first house on a council estate in West Midlands, U.K., after residing in caravans for three generations. This was the first time Save the Children was able to use real stories to communicate the meaning and experience of genuine deprivation in a wealthy country.”

If I’d read this statement first, without observing the photographs, what would I have imagined seeing? I thought about this later as we were discussing the final three essays in order to pick the winner. “The Jones Family” is such a quiet, interior set of photographs. These were not images that I would have associated with Save the Children, those rotating black-and-white photographs of children from all over the planet so common on the TV promos.

Photo by Liz Hingley on behalf of Save The Children

The wealth, and therefore opportunity, that surrounds the Jones is implied by the amenities they have acquired—a sofa, a dishwasher, a blow dryer, a microwave. They have a roof over their heads, a place to sleep—in so many ways their lives are disarmingly familiar—but they inhabit an economic and social space very different from my own. I am introduced to this reality, and the immediacy of it, through Hingley’s spare but evocative essay about nine recurring characters in the few rooms of a house on a council estate in England. She forms “a trusting relationship with . . . the Jones,” she says, “in order to develop a more subtle visual language.” Her ambition is to provide “new ways of representing the stories of both struggle and resilience. As a young person myself, it was a transformative relationship of mutual learning and sharing.”

The photographs, without moving beyond the confines of the house, are about environment in a way that compels us to think about the culture, society, and landscape outside and picture it in our minds. This one essay conveys the power of story to shift, and re-shift, ideas and feelings in the space of a few breaths. One family’s hardships, the Jones family’s hardships—parents unemployed, children crowded into one room, the bed serving as table, desk, play and sleep space—exposes the vulnerability of us all. This is a middle place usually hidden from our view when we think about people in crisis; they’re not refugees, they’re not living in a tent, they’re not malnourished or wounded, they’re not working in terrible conditions.

Photo by Sara Anjargolian on behalf of Tufenkian Foundation

One of the judges said something about how hard we can become in our prejudices, our preconceptions (from our vantage point of freedom, in every sense of the word). What do we, assuming “we” are privileged Americans or citizens of the First World, think when we see a homeless person asking for money while talking on a cellphone? How poor is poor? What sort of distinctions do we make in the situations in which we are involved and, critically, in situations that we are witnessing by proxy? And what do we do about them, in thought and deed? I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, which have been asked often and more eloquently by better minds, but I know I have given them a lot of thought in the last few days. How to see what’s around us, and what’s afar, in new ways—ways that do not seem to trivialize and marginalize or, on the other hand, exploit their subjects, as individuals and as part of larger categories (“the poor”)? This internal struggle was what compelled me to choose Hingley’s essay over the other two finalists’ intelligent and accomplished essays, which were also about poverty and powerlessness: “How We Live: Life on the Margins in Armenia” by Sara Anjargolian for the Tufenkian Foundation and “Copper Eaters” by Gwenn Dubourthoumieu for the Carter Center, which shows us a story of copper mining interests in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Photo by Gwenn Dubourthoumieu on behalf of The Carter Center

Interestingly and affectingly, two of the three winning photographers made their photographs in their home countries (Liz Hingley in the U.K. and Amateur Grand Prize winner Natasha Kharlamova in Russia for the rehabilitation center Our Sunny World), again pushing on ideas of inside and outside. Karlamova’s essay, “Maxim’s People,” tells the story of Maxim, a fourteen-year-old boy with a rare form of cerebral paralysis who can’t walk but who can ride a horse, who can’t speak but is profoundly connected to others. The people who surround him seem enriched by knowing him, and he, more obviously, by being with them. One photograph of a man holding Maxim as he lifts him from or into a car conveys this reciprocity with wonderful tenderness and affection.

Photo by Natasha Kharlamova on behalf of Our Sunny World

Photo by Kai Löffelbein on behalf of Society for Community Organization

Another close-up look at how people live together is Student Grand Prize winner Kai Löffelbein’s  “Hidden Hong Kong” for the Society for Community Organization. “With a population of more than seven million, Hong Kong is one of the planet’s most densely packed metropolitan areas, with 25,900 people living in every square km,” Löffelbein writes. He describes how landlords charge around US$200 a month for a dog-container-like cage or a small wooden cubicle in rooms of twenty such containers. And then there are his startlingly intimate yet restrained photographs of the different planes of existence happening in these blocks of space. We are “in” the room with a man who has lived in his “cage home apartment” for thirty years and another man who is waiting for public housing. He shows us a nighttime rooftop view from these compartments, and then, more strikingly, there’s a photograph of one of these buildings from the street, looking up. Having visited and walked around Kowloon and Mong Kok myself, I was stunned by these images—by these vivid portrayals of lives and living conditions within the walls of seemingly humdrum high-rises. The profundity of what we can’t see. And the sting of recognizing that we often don’t understand what we’re looking at, and the realization that this is precisely why we need photographers to do this sort of work for us.

The student essays were unexpectedly strong, and there was an energetic discussion around how to photograph a story of what’s beyond our sight, or what comes into view for only a short time. Student finalist Dijana Muminovic’s “Beneath My Land” for the Missing Person Institute is a story about Lake Perucac in Bosnia, “which was flooded before survivors were able to exhume the bodies of their loved ones who were killed and thrown in the lake during the Serbian aggression. In 2010, because a dam in a Serbian town upstream malfunctioned, the lake dried up, allowing hundreds of volunteers to search for victims’ remains. Sadly, Lake Perucac was flooded before the search was completed.” Muminovic is Bosnian, and she also relates how, at the age of nine, she survived the war by hiding in basements. The necessity of the organization’s work and the ingenuity of the photographer were evident in this essay of missing people whose histories are ultimately unrecoverable.

Photo by Dijana Muminovic on behalf of The Missing Person Institute

As an invitation for attention and a call to action, the concentration of message in story—whether of a person, a family, or a more random group of people inhabiting a space together—has tremendous potency. The seeming limitation of the singular, over the collective, is more than offset by the space that narrative opens up, a space that allows the viewer, reader, or listener to attend with less judgment and fewer defenses. I don’t have a neat wrap-up to what I’ve written, but I can attest to the power of photographs (particularly as essays or book-length narratives) to provoke understanding and change, and to bring the world, even communities recognizable or close at hand, into our range of vision so that we might see with refreshed eyes, hearts, minds.

Links:

http://photophilanthropy.org/new-home

http://photophilanthropy.org/2012-award-winners/

In honor of breast cancer awareness month, we are featuring an outstanding series of photographs by Kerry Mansfield.

Writing and photos by Kerry Mansfield.

I should begin by stating that I truly hate pictures of myself, let alone the images shot during one of the most emotionally and physically hardest phases in my life for the Aftermath series. That said, there were several motivating factors to take camera in hand once I had received a diagnosis of advanced-stage, aggressive Breast Cancer at 31 years old. Initially the photos were not intended to be seen by or shared with a larger public but rather to simply document the stages of my treatment and the body that I would never have again. As most women know, we often have favored body parts that we claim to like about ourselves and my chest was mine. Losing half of it was no less an amputation than the chemo was poison in my veins.

In my role as a photographer I mustered up enough energy to take the pictures between each critical stage in my treatment but my body often lagged far beyond my weakened mind’s best intentions. Worse yet, I made mistakes in exposures and set-ups more often than I’d ever done before due to a muddled mind and incessant pain that made it hard to focus. And, of course, once the moment has passed there is no going back so the photos had to stand “as is” in their lack of perfection. This lesson of acceptance has been one of the most valuable lessons learned from the endeavor.

In my alternate role as the subject of the series there were other challenges to tackle such as mustering up the sheer energy and artistic will to lay myself bare (literally) in front of an unsympathetic lens. I began to use those moments to stare my cancer and it’s treatment in the eye without flinching, determined to be the victor. Thus, what had originally began as straight documentation, the images eventually morphed into a dialog between my will to live and the omnipresent poisons that rendered my body as lifeless on a good day. Today, I’m continuously humbled by the attention the work has received and the myriad of cancer patients and survivors that find some solace in the pictures. The work is no longer my own personal meditation but rather a gift to the viewer wrapped in shadows of my former body and a desire to not forget that beauty can be born out of the ugly.

 Aftermath Project Statement:

As a photographer, I’ve spent most of my career looking deeply into the spaces we inhabit. The idea of Home – what it meant and how it felt, preoccupied my thinking. Almost all my pictures were of the spaces we live in or the things we live with. But at the age of 31, a diagnosis of breast cancer forced me to redefine my ideas of home.

Needless to say it came as quite a shock. I had exercised and eaten correctly, and like many of my age, I felt indestructible, never thinking the most basic of dwellings could be lost. Faced with the nihilistic process of radical chemotherapy and surgery, my ideas of “where” I exist turned inward. As the doctors, with their knives and chemistry broke down the physical structure in which I lived, the relationship between the cellular self and the metaphysical self became glaringly clear. My body may not be me, but without it, I am something else entirely. I knew that my long held image of myself would be shattered. What would emerge would be a mystery.

It was in that spirit of unknown endings, that I picked up my camera to self document the catharsis of my own cancer treatment. No one was there when these pictures were made, just my dissolving ideas of self and a camera. And what began as a story that could have ended in many ways, this chapter, like my treatment, has now run its course. While I can’t say everything is fine now, I will say, “These are the images of my Home – as it was then”, and with a little luck, there will be no more to come.

See more of Kerry Mansfield’s work HERE.

For the 2012 PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards, PhotoPhilanthropy is thrilled to be partnering with the Mountain Workshops to offer a scholarship to the 2013 Mountain Workshops. This is an amazing opportunity for any photographer, and we could not be more pleased to have the opportunity to offer it to one of the entrants to the Activist Awards. All photographers who submit to this year’s Activist Awards (deadline Nov. 1) will be considered for an expenses-paid place in the 2013 Workshops.

You can apply for the 2012 Mountain Workshops HERE if there are still spaces available. The 2012 Workshops will take place in mid-October.

Photo by Mountain Workshops participant, Leslye Davis. Charles and Mark empty a grain silo in order to refill it with fresh corn.

Excited about our partnership with the Mountain Workshops, PhotoPhilanthropy caught up with one of the Workshops’ alums, Leslye Davis. Davis won POYi’s 2011 Multimedia Portfolio Prize for a story she produced during her time at the Workshop, while still a student at Western Kentucky University.

Read PhotoPhilanthropy’s interview with Leslye (conducted via email): 

PhotoPhilanthropy: When did you attend the Mountain Workshops?

Leslye Davis: I was a participant in the Mountain Workshops in 2009, 2010, and 2011. The first year, I was an editing participant; the second year, a multimedia participant; and the third year, a photo participant.

PP: Before you attended the Workshops, what kind of photographic work were you doing?

LD: Before attending the Workshops, I was a sophomore at Western Kentucky University. I was passionate about photojournalism, but certainly not a strong shooter at the time. I didn’t really understand design and editing. I knew what photos I liked, but couldn’t verbalize what made it good. And at the time, my friends and family were my main subjects.

PP: What project did you work on at the Mountain Workshops? 

LD: The first year at MWS, I was on the team that edited the book. My coaches were Greg Cooper and Mick Cochran. I was responsible for editing four or five different stories and designing their layouts for the book. That was a big year for me because, even though the workshop is only one week, you’re packing in a lot of knowledge under pressure. We would spend long days looking through the shooting participant’s takes, choosing the photos that we thought best told the story, and then discussing our decisions in a critique with the whole editing group.

The second year, I did the multimedia workshops. Liz O. Baylen from the Los Angeles Times was my coach, which was exciting because I really admired her work.

My story that year was about a family in Elizabethtown, KY. The father, Chris Jensen, was in the military and he was about to be deployed for the fourth time.

And then, the third year, I was a photo participant. Carolyn Cole was my coach and I worked on a story about a father and son who ran a farm in Eubank, KY. It was the quintessential Kentucky farming story.

PP: What was your overall experience at the Workshops?

LD: All three years, I was lucky to end up with the stories and the coaches that I did.

The workshops are physically and mentally exhausting. Some people came in assuming that it was just a chance to meet people in the industry, but it’s more than that. [Your coaches] expect you to tell the story you’ve selected (drawn at random out of a hat, by the way).

That said, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Each year I was pushed to do things I didn’t know that I was capable of and I walked away with more understanding of the craft in one week than you might get in months.

PP: Was there anything that stuck out in your mind about your experience at the Workshops?

LD: The experience in my mind that stands out most about the Workshops is the party that comes at the end of the week. Like I said, everyone is exhausted by then. Some people have 6AM flights to catch the next morning so they can go to work. And other people have a ten-hour drive to get home, but almost everyone goes to this party on the last night. And it’s not because it’s their duty as a coach or as a participant. It’s because after a really tough week, everyone looks forward to celebrating something that they accomplished together. It’s really cool.

PP: Were the Workshops helpful for the evolution of your work?

LD: Coming in as a young, green journalist, the Workshops changed my perspective on what’s important about our work.

When you get there, you jump right in with this story that you’re trying to tell. You go meet the subjects on the first day and you spend every waking moment with them until the end of the week…and sometimes sleeping moments, too. Kentuckians are especially welcoming and trusting. It taught me that this job comes with a big responsibility to the people whose stories you’re trying to tell.

PP:  What are you working on now?

LD: I’m working on a couple of projects for the paper, mostly shooting and editing photos and video.

Leslye Davis was born and raised (mostly) in Kentucky. She graduated from the WKU photojournalism program in 2012. She is currently an intern at The New York Times. 

To see Leslye’s work, visit her website at leslyedavis.com

It’s that time of year again.

It’s time to honor outstanding work by photographers from around the world.

Submissions open now for the 2012 PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Awards.

Open to any photographer who has documented the work of an NGO,

nonprofit or foundation within the past three years.

Submit your photo essay on the PhotoPhilanthropy website.

Review the submission guidelines on our website HERE.

Reflections by Alissa Brooks

I am a self-proclaimed documentary junkie.  The power of visual storytelling is unparalleled.  I have always wanted to try my hand at making a documentary, and through a social documentary workshop put on by Stirring the Fire (STF), I got to do just that.

Led by Phil Borges, an accomplished photographer and filmmaker, the focus of the 10-day workshop is to provide women-focused organizations high quality, affordable media that they are involved in from pre-production, to production, to distribution.  At the same time STF works to inspire and train emerging media producers, like yours truly, to do this kind of work through hands-on, real world social documentary production.  The final product of the women’s organization meets media producer collaboration, then, is high impact and effective media that ignites the audience into action—storytelling that helps to advance women and girls.

Author Alissa Brooks Tweeting from the field.

For this particular workshop, Phil and the rest of the STF team partnered with Foundation for Women (FFW), an organization that helps to lift women out of poverty through micro-credit loans.  Each of the six participants was chosen carefully to create a strong team.  Each of us had our own expertise to share.  Some were photographers, another a storyteller and I was the social media person.  All of our diverse backgrounds fostered collaboration and further propelled the learning process.

Working in the classroom.

The workshop content consisted of pre-production planning, interviewing FFW heroes to choose the women to document, learning the art of storytelling, going on location, taking photographs, shooting video, interviewing, collecting audio, editing and numerous coffee breaks.

My hands-on experience included collecting audio with a TasCam, conducting multiple interviews, walking around a trailer park with an ingenious 8-year-old, explaining video consent forms in broken Spanish, and eating homemade cake with butter-cream icing and strawberries.  By the end of the workshop the six of us drafted two short documentaries.

The true final product, at least as the participant is concerned, is not several minutes of crafted visual story.  The true product of this social documentary workshop is inspiration.  We, the media makers, are put together with other like-minded, creative persons.  Working in groups, we share our skills, ideas, and courage.  That is the true genius: getting everyone together – organizations, producers, and artists – and creating meaning and stir the fire.

Transcribing.