Mobile phone repair shop, Kolkata. Copyright Rob Godden

The Guardian newspaper (UK) continues its Flickr photo projects in 2012 with this interesting challenge. Only open to those residing in developing countries, they are asking people to document one theme over the coming year. Whether education, farming, business or politics – they want people to shoot a series of images regularly over the year to tell an in-depth and evolving story.

Details can be found here. You can check out the Guardian Flickr group here to see what has already been posted. Questions can be submitted either via Flickr or to development@guardian.co.uk.

Glengarry Glen Ross, adapted from a play by David Mamet, tells two days in the lives of four salesmen and how they become desperate when the corporate office sends a representative, Blake, to “motivate” them. Blake, among a series of verbal abuse on the men, announces that only the top two sellers will stay in the company and the rest of them will be fired.

Here is the scene:

Here is Oxfam America’s interpretation:

I imagine that the intention of the video was not only to create surprise on the audience through the script but also to make a link with the original film. In such a way, the message will be made more powerful through its references.

Does it work in this sense? I have some doubts. It is well filmed and staged and obviously it refers to a film which had an excellent casting (Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris and  Alec Balwing among others) and which received good reviews. But, do you know the film? I did not. Do the receptors of the campaing know the film? Probably not, it seems that in America it did not have commercial success.

So, was it worthy to recreate the whole scene – and obviously invest the money- to refer to a film that probably very few people have seen? And if they do not make the connection to the original film, will they able to stand the shouting to get the message and to make sense of it?

(Many thanks to Shani Orgad for letting me know about these two videos)

I came across Sophie Gerrard’s work a couple of weeks back when the BBC featured her latest piece on the Akhand Jyoti Eye hospital in Bihar. It is beautiful, positive and inspiring. It does not linger on the negative nor over dramatize the issue. Other work, like ‘The Right to Life’ on maternal health in India, strike a similar tone and are in stark contrast to other rather shrill pieces of work out there in NGO-ville. Take a look at her site here.

Lets start with what may be a familiar economics experiment called ‘The Ultimatum Game.’ For those unfamiliar with the game it goes like this; two people are paired and one is given $10. This person (the proposer) gets to decide how the money is split between the two of them. The second person (the responder) gets to accept or reject the offer. If the offer is accepted each gets to keep their respective amounts. If rejected no one gets anything.

What tends to happen is that the proposer, rather than offer a small amount (say $1) and pocket the rest, usually offers close to 50%. What they understand is that if they offer a low amount the responder, rather than cut their losses and take what ever is offered (after all, anything better than $0 is a win for them), they punish the proposer by rejecting ‘unfair’ amounts. In some ways this appears illogical – the responder should take what ever is on offer. But that inner sense of what is ‘right’ is vital to social interactions. The game taps into a whole load of sympathetic human instincts based on us being a social animal. It is also worth noting at this point that this experiment gets the same results where ever it is conducted, but it Germany, Japan or Indonesia.

A variation on ‘The Ultimatum Game’ is ‘The Dictator Game.’ Here the set up is the same except the proposer dictates how much the responder will get. Yet even here the proposer ‘dictator’ tends to give away around 30% of the $10. Even when they don’t need to be generous they are. That is unless the game is changed slightly. In the first two versions of the game both proposer and responder have sat opposite each other. The third variation is set up like ‘The Dictator Game’ but with the proposer ‘dictator’ in a separate room to the responder. In this set up the dictator offers far smaller amounts to the responder. It is all in the distance. The lack of interaction with the person you are screwing, the isolation from those who suffer from your greed, makes us insensitive (which may do some way to explaning the move of the Burmese captial to Naypyidaw).

Here is another experiment. People in this experiment are asked a simple question – ‘How much would you be willing to donate to a charitable cause?’ It was found that when shown a photo of a malnourished Malawian child the average donation was $2.50. However, when given a wealth of statistics on the scale of malnutrition in Malawi, its impact on millions of children and the mortality rate (rather than the photo), people gave 50% less. One photo and an individual tragic story generated double the amount of money compared to the information presenting the true scope of the problem. The stats just didn’t tap into the innate sympathetic parts of our brain.

So, what does all this have to do with visual media and social activism? Well, it goes back to a point I and many others have made regarding bridging the empathetic gap. Usually, this is raised in reference to mobilising people to take action e.g. getting the public to write to MPs etc. But what ‘The Dictator Game’ shows us is that our primary target should be those in power. The trouble is we are showing them the wrong things. We tend to target them with detailed, legalistic, scientific research reports, briefings or submissions. We stand up in UN forums or government lobbying meetings and present ‘serious’ information. We enter into a particular form of information exchange that often deliberately excludes individual stories and predominantly uses text rather than images. But what this does is to actually allow those in power to avoid having to deal emotionally with the issues. They get the cold stats and can respond in a cold way. Rather than ‘speaking truth to power’ we should be ‘showing individual truths to power.’ What needs reinforcing is their empathetic link to those they serve, their constituents. Stats are for technocrats to implement, individual visual stories win hearts (or more accurately, fire the sympathetic regions of our brains). That is not to say good solid research is not important (you need to show context and breadeth of impact), but by relying solely on this type of communication we are failing to understand how the mind works. For example, picture this. An NGO rep stands up at the UN Human Rights Council and reads out a statement about how hundreds, if not thousands, were killed due to the Sri Lankan army shelling hospitals in its offensive against the LTTE in 2009. Now imagine instead of them reading out the statement they show you footage of this, not just the carnage but interviews with the families who survived, who lost their wives, husbands and children. The impact, emotions and outrage in that room would, I believe, be entirely different. That is why the C4 documentary ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields‘ caused such a storm and the governemnt made such efforts to rebut and discredit the footage.

Another lesson is what most NGOs, especially development organisations, knew all along. The ‘poster child’, no matter what political or ideological problems we may have with it, works. That is not to excuse the lazy trotting out of the emaciated mother and child every time a famine is declared. But it does demonstrate that people respond to human stories, at least in the immediate sense in that they give money. What we need to work on is getting less desperate stories to people about the lives of those less fortunate before things reach these extremes. We need stories that people can empathise with, not based on tragedy but identity. These need to shun stereotypes, but to do that NGOs need to take risks, be innovative and not be afraid to show the nuisances of life in the places they work e.g. its not all tragedy, that in fact people have a good time and are getting on with their lives like we all try to do. Stories that put us across the table to those in need in order that we give a fair response rather than isolate us further.

Projects like those shown here run by Greenpeace are not going to address the state’s failure to keep up with the power demand of the country. The resulting economic impact of such a huge short fall of electricity, or for that matter the slow pace in connecting remote communities outside major urban centres (or informal settlements within) will not be dented by solar power running a few lamps or computers. However, for the communities they may make all the difference in being able to study or keeping produce fresh for retail. The solar lamp scheme pictured by Greene – where members of the Kibera Community Youth Programme (KCYP) were trained in assembling solar powered lamps is the type of initiative Greenpeace should be spending its time promoting (rather than its boys-with-toys adventure activism nonsense).

Now, lets hope there is enough power for me to watch England vs. India in the Cricket World Cup this afternoon…

JOHN MACCAULEY, 20. John was 10 years old when he made the staggering decision to leave his family and join ‘The House of Jesus for the Disabled’ – a community of around 50 disabled men and women that life on a small plot of land in the middle of Freetown. As a child he would play with the children in this community, and as a result of the friendships he forged he decided that he would like to dedicate his life to helping them. He was the first ‘healthy’ to join the ‘The House of Jesus’, and is now an invaluable member of it. He spends his days there repairing wheelchairs and making new ones out of old prams. John is also an adept tailor, and teaches many in the community this skill. The ethos of ‘The House of Jesus’ is to move away from a culture of dependency, and to move towards a level of self-sufficiency. By learning certain skills, such as tailoring, they can earn an income to support themselves and their families, instead of being completely reliant on aid and the generosity of others.

Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries in the world, with terrible rates of infant mortality and one of the lowest life expectancies in Africa.  But these stark statistics should not define the region, or its people. I could have so easily turned my lens to the inhabitants of Kroo Bay (one of the worst slums in the world), but that would have been too easy, and too reductive a view of Sierra Leone.

‘This is the first time in over 20 years that I have studied. I work very hard, but I don’t mind because I love what we learn here…….one day I would like to set up my own salon’. HALIMATU KADIA CONTEH, 34.

Ultimately I feel very ambivalent about the kind of ‘shoot and run’ tactics employed by some photographers that sees them profit from someone else’s hardship. I also question how helpful these snapshot images are in promoting the cause of LEDCs. I feel that we are so often bombarded with media images of poverty that we have become almost desensitised to such sights.  I think it’s now time we start to represent those in the third world as individuals, not as victims.  Perhaps this change of tact could have a profound effect on the way we view the developing world, and the lives of the people that live there.

“Political tolerance, further education and civil liberties – without these things our country cannot move forward." Andrew Koromah brought the concept of independent journalism to Sierra Leone. In the early 1990’s he set-up Kiss FM and Sky Radio, the country’s first independent radio stations. These were instrumental in linking Sierra Leone throughout the civil war, and importantly they gave each faction a public voice during the conflict. His efforts have been recognised internationally, and he has won a number of awards including the Knight Press Fellowship from the International Centre of Journalism in Washington. Andrew tirelessly ploughs all his energies into the development of Sierra Leone, whether it is the creation of community radio stations, or the lobbying of government for the ratification of treaties, including the Convention of the Rights of Children. “Sierra Leone is still a deeply polarized country... we need to cultivate a greater level of unification in order to progress.” ANDREW KROMAH, 53.

This at least was my aim – and so I set out to photograph and interview as broad a cross section of Sierra Leonean society as possible. I met everyone from musicians to village chiefs, civil servants to dollar boys, hairdressers to taxi drivers, soldiers to schoolgirls.  Consequently I came away with a very rich understanding of what Sierra Leone is like today, and I can tell you that it is a country that is characterised by so much more than its poverty and sad history. It has fully moved on from the civil war that defines it in so many people’s imaginations, and it now stands as a nation steeped in optimism and hope.  The country still has a long way to go, but if the opportunities on offer could match the motivation of its people, then Sierra Leone would be positively thriving by now. As it stands there is a dearth of employment in the country. Aid still floods in, a lot of which is channelled into education, but without jobs this education is not capitalised on.

“What do I love about this country? Take a look around you...what’s not to love? MARLENA BANDU, 29.

Today Sierra Leone has a huge amount to offer; it’s rich in minerals, has a climate perfectly suited to agriculture and has some of the most beautiful beaches in Africa. What Sierra Leone would now benefit from alongside aid is foreign investment, better infrastructure and sustainable tourism.  All of this would provide much sought after jobs, which in turn would bolster the economy and allow Sierra Leone to flourish independently of aid. However these things will not start to happen until outdated perceptions of the country are changed.  It is my hope that this project has gone some way to doing this.

Sophia Spring

To see the full set of photos and stories go here.

Check out AidWatch for more on this initiative.

Nepal – Life Cycles by Robert Godden | Make Your Own Book

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Best

Rob

Last year, I managed to watch some of the film (a poor quality copy on DVD) and it was clearly quite disturbing. However, without watching the whole thing it was difficult to tell what Martens’ intentions were. The film had been shown at my university and the person who lent me the copy (given to him by the artist so no pirating involved!) – told me that the audience reaction was quite negative.

“They did not understand the film. They though that the film was real, that Martens was laughing at Congolese people and making fun of their poverty, their suffering.”

This could not be further from Martens’ intentions but it is not an unreasonable reaction to the film which, described as a work of ‘documentary art’, it is a mixture of Borat-style mockery, conceptual art and a Michael Moore/Nick Broomfield documentary, leaving the viewer puzzled every time Martens crosses the line between the genres.

Below is a summary of the film – described as “an investigation of the emotional and economic value of Africa’s most lucrative export: filmed poverty” – and the Q&A that followed.

The alleviation poverty industry

The film starts with Martens saying;

“You can’t give them [the Congolese people] anything they don’t already have. You shouldn’t give them anything they don’t have. You should train them, empower them. There are new opportunities, new markets, new products”.

With these words, taken from a leaflet of an NGO, the artist undertakes a journey to launch a programme that will help the poor in the DRC become aware of their most important source of money: poverty. Martens wants them to realise that they are excluded from making money out of this ‘natural resource’ while others, coming from the West, are taking advantage of it. Martens wants the poor to profit as well.

With this development project in mind, he travels to a village in Central Congo by foot via long and muddy roads. Martens, who is the main narrator as well as cameraman, performs here the role of the colonial master travelling with porters who bring two enormous metal boxes. At some point, he sings “A man needs a maid” by Neil Young.

At the end of the trip, the boxes are opened and their content revealed: little pieces of crystal neon brought from Europe and a generator to create a luminous piece of conceptual art with the words ‘Enjoy, please, poverty’. Then, Martens explains with a monotone, distant voice to the villagers that, with this luminous advert, he wants to publicise new ideas: Congolese people need to be resigned to their poverty and they must be satisfied with it. They must be aware that their reality is not going to change and they must be happy because they are doing something useful: helping people in developed countries to ‘feel good’.

The journey is intercut with other scenes in which the artist performs multiple characters, recreating some of the roles performed by Western people in Africa: the missionary, the teacher, the humanitarian aid worker, the journalist, the photographer, etc. His roles adopt most of the time pedantic and patronising attitudes. The characters, all performed as the real Renzo Martens, are never portrayed sympathetically.

Through his performances and the numerous encounters that take place in the film, no one from the ‘poverty alleviation industry’ or corporations seem spared from Martens’ criticism: the World Bank and its acceptance that aid is the main economic resource for this country “because it is normal when a country is developing after a conflict”; the UN peacekeepers concentrated mainly in areas where big corporations dig to get gold, diamonds or coltan; the plantation owner whose local workers do not earn enough to feed their children and for whom the death of 16 children out of 1000 due to malnutrition “is not so bad and maybe it is not because they do not have money but because the father drinks or …you know”; humanitarian NGOs leaving an area that still needs aid; international bodies running camps for internally displaced people (IDP) where all the tents are stamped with logos, “visibility, I suppose” – tells a UNHCR representative..

Martens, through the film, challenges the solution that is currently offered by different organizations aiming to end poverty. He questions the whole system of NGOs and international bodies, based in the West, created to alleviate poverty and he argues that “there is no intention in making real structural changes”. The film goes in the same direction of some recent thinking related to the effectiveness of the ‘aid industry’ such as the book entitled ‘Dead Aid’ by Dambia Moyo , William Easterly’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’, and even Ha-Joon Chang’s ‘Bad Samaritans.’

The Art World

The main aim of ‘Episode 3 – ‘Enjoy Poverty’ is not criticism of those who work in the development sector but those who take advantage of ‘filmed poverty’. As Martens clearly stated in the Q&A session after the screening, his criticism is not aimed at international institutions, humanitarian agencies or corporations. He sees his work mainly as a reflection on the trend that has developed within the art world.

“I could not make a film on exploitation. I made a film on exploitation within the art world!” he says.

He wants to expose “the relation of power between those who watch and those who are being watched, between those who take photographs/film and those who are being photographed/filmed”. According to Martens, in the last ten years there has been a trend in contemporary art, a kind of “documentary turn” with numerous works of art dealing with social and political issues, dealing with the world but no one had problematised that power relationship.

For him, as with other raw materials such as cocoa, coffee, and diamonds, the poor being filmed and photographed do not gain from the money made from their imagery. If the consumption of cocoa, coffee, etc. today is not neutral, “the consumption of images cannot be neutral and the consumer of art today cannot be a neutral spectator”.

The production of filmed poverty is criticised in numerous ways in the film. On the one hand, no one is more criticised than “the character who travels with his piece of conceptual art to the middle of a village in Africa”.

Some aspects of the production of images from developing countries are questioned in different moments in the film:

The ownership of the images and the copyright – Martens asks an Italian photographer working for a press agency ‘who is the owner of the pictures he takes?’ The Italian photographer answers, “I am the owner”. Martens insists playing dumb – “But don’t you think that the people set up the scene, it is their house, their objects?” The photographer looks at Martens with surprise and answers suspiciously, “Yes, but I am the one who decides when to take the picture, I am the one who decides the moment. That makes the picture mine”.

The value of the pictures – Martens contrasts the earning power of a plantation worker who has a malnourished child against the price that could be earned by a Western photographer picturing him.

The type of images we consume from developing countries and who takes them. Martens, at some point in the film, undertakes another project where, under his guidance, local photographers start photographing malnourished children and women who have been raped instead of wedding parties because “war pays more” – illustrated when Martens creates a table contrasting the price of war pictures and wedding pictures. They plan to sell the pictures taken by the local photographers to foreign media or organizations. In one of the most disturbing scenes of the film, the local photographers visit a hospital with malnourished children. Martens plays the ceremony master and directs the situation telling how and what to photograph, looking always for the most distressing angles. “Did the Western photographers ask the children to take off their shirts?” asks Martens to the doctor. “Yes”, says the doctor. Then Martens ask the local photographers to do the same. Then Martens and the men go to see a Medecins sans Frontiers representatives to find out whether they would be allowed to take pictures in a MSF hospital or whether they would be interested in buying their photos. The answer to both questions is ‘no’. One of the MSF representatives makes a little comment on the quality of the pictures brought to them. The local photographers leave the scene humiliated while Martens coldly tells them that their plan has failed and they are not going to be able to sell their photos.

The consumer of images

Martens’ criticism does not stop at the producers of the images. He wants also to question the consumers. At different moments he performs a reproduction of the Western public’s attitude in front of distressing images – consumed daily in the West via newspapers, TV or NGOs leaflets – of people suffering of hunger, lack of the housing, hospitals etc. He wants to question their lack of action, the lack of real engagement to solve the situation: not one which stops at giving a bit of money to a humanitarian NGO to feel good about ourselves.

Martens then performs the role of a guy who watches suffering but does not do anything. He does not intervene, he just continues filming or adopts an irritating, even cruel, attitude. He watches a child while he dies, he asks with indifference a plantation worker to show to the camera her daughter’s sores due to malnourishment. He asks malnourished children to take their shirts off to get a better picture – a “good picture”.

For Martens the solutions is simple – as he says in other contexts – people in the West should accept to pay the right price for the products produced in countries like Congo.

Ethics of the film

I understand those who had the impression that Martens uses people for his own “artistic” aim, exploits them for his little piece of conceptual art. In some situations he goes to such extremes that, in fact, he seems to go beyond the arguments he criticises.

The style he uses in the film increases the viewers doubt. The ‘documentary-style’ gives a realistic touch throughout the film. In the moments when we are in a Borat-style passage it is easy to see the performed style. In others, like the documentary style passages, it is more difficult to understand whether it is a performance or not. Even if you accept that he is performing – which is not always evident – are the Congolese people performing too? Is the mother crying after the death of her child performing? Are the local photographers when humiliated performing?

Although very difficult to watch at times, I think this film is a very useful tool for education either in art/film/photography studies or in the humanitarian world. It opens a door for reflection on numerous issues and it brings new ways to approach those reflections, some times in very distressing ways.

As a final note, during the Q&A session, it was almost a relief to discover that the real Renzo Martens is nothing like the one we see in the film. The real one not only did not make fun of the local photographers but he has started an artistic project with them. The villagers who worshiped the luminous sign ‘Enjoy, please, poverty’ are receiving money out of the distribution of the film. What I liked most is that he talked about these initiatives very reluctantly. His work was the film, whatever he has done outside the film was a private matter.

Ever since I came across the website ‘This is Kroo Bay’ last year wanted to learn more about how such a comprehensive and innovative approach came about. Well, thanks to Rachel Palmer, Photography & Film Manager at Save the Children UK I got what I wanted.

‘This is Kroo Bay’ needs to be seen – it is full of photos, stories, video and marvellous interactive 360 degree panoramas to explore. There are in fact two Kroo Bay sites, as Rachel explains below. Both are worth your time and raise the bar in regard to the use of multimedia / interactive websites by NGOs.

Many thanks to Rachel for responding so well to my inquiries and providing an insight into the use of visual media by an INGO.

***

Hi, I’m Rachel Palmer and I’m the Photography and Film manager at Save the Children UK. I manage the film and photo team who deliver all the film and photo assignments at Save the Children. This includes covering our development work, work responding to disasters, our campaigns or fundraising work. I developed the concept for ‘Kroo Bay’ and produced the site working with Anna Kari and Guilhem Alandry, who has produced a great deal of panorama work in the past.

With the ‘Kroo Bay’ site we wanted to push the boundaries of how an interactive experience could  place our programme work in the homes of our supporters, to give them a  ’ real life ’  experience  of a community in Africa  through cutting edge multimedia technology. The idea was to allow them to explore the world and lives of the people they are supporting with Save the Children,  to really connect them with the issues and dilemmas they face .

We chose Kroo Bay, a slum in Freetown, for this project because it ’ s one of the worst places in Sierra Leone ,  a country that ’ s officially recognised as the toughest place in the world to be born. 1 in 4 children die before their fifth birthday. They die from diseases we know how to treat and prevent ,  diseases like malaria, cholera and pneumonia.

We chose to work with Anna Kari and Guilhem Alandry on this project. Anna has worked for Save the Children on a number of assignments previously and always produced high quality, emotive images that have been very effective in our campaigns. I saw Guilhem’s 360 images in an exhibition he held and was very impressed. We got talking about a multi media project he and Anna had worked on in Glasgow using these 360 degree images, sound and photography. Concurrently at Save the Children we were exploring ways of bringing our supporters closer to our work without actually taking them on visits and I thought there must be something creative we could do with the concept Anna and Guilhem had developed. We met up and discussed possibilities and I pitched the idea to the Head of Communications at Save the Children. It all went from there!

The project has enabled people to connect with our work in a new and more meaningful way, helping us create deeper relationships with  our supporters.  I think it’s been a very successful way of demonstrating a sense of place but also a way of communicating the richness of community life, the highs as well as the lows. So often we only have the opportunity to show the ‘need’ of the people we work with and aren’t able to show the complexities of their lives. This project has given us the opportunity to explore experiences that connect people from across the world – such as children’s passion for football, mother’s hopes for their unborn child, the different hairstyles and fashions found in Kroo Bay. We’ve found it particularly successful within the classroom environment when teachers have used it as a means to engage their pupils with development issues.  There’s been some fantastic feedback on the ‘Kroo Bay’ message board.

Although the webisode updates are less frequent than they were in the first year of the site launching we’re still doing updates when it fits with what’s going on in the community and with other campaigns that we’re running. We also have the news feed where we post news that’s relevant to the community.

We have done a similar project in Liberia – ‘This is Kingsville’ – which was done in conjunction with the Sunday Times. We have also used the technology we developed for the Kroo Bay site to be able to do one off interactive panoramic scenes to report back on the situation for children in disaster situations such as Haiti.

The reason there are two ‘Kroo Bay’ sites is because Anna and Guilhem wanted to create their own that was based on the same concept but didn’t have all the functionality – such as campaigning and donating. We were happy for them to do that even though the work used on their version was done for Save the Children because we feel it’s more important to engage people in overseas development issues as broadly as possible.

You can check out the Save the Children ‘This is Kroo Bay’ site here. And Anna and Guihem’s version here.