Ethical Dilemmas of a Semi-Photojournalist

 I take pictures.  Specifically, I take pictures of development projects run by the Mennonite Central Committee and our partner agencies in Nepal.  Then I send those pictures back to North America, with the hope that they will be used in promotional materials, magazine articles, and giving catalogues.  A good photograph will educate people about what we’re doing here and inspire them to donate so we can keep doing it.

I believe this is good work, and I feel honoured and excited that I get to do it as part of my job (it’s not my whole job, which is why I refer to myself a “semi-photojournalist” in the title of this post).  Nonetheless, sometimes when I go out with the camera I feel a sort of ethical discomfort.  I come to the villages with a small delegation of foreign and Nepali development workers from Kathmandu, with my fancy camera, and I take pictures of poor people who have been the recipients of western generosity.  And then I leave, and they remain.  Our partner agencies, of course, are all Nepali, and they are committed for the long-term to the communities in which they work.  I have no criticisms to make about MCC’s approach to development – it’s admirably sophisticated and sensitive to the huge web of difficulties inherent in western humanitarian aid.  But I wonder how I as an individual appear to the people whose lives I’m photographing.  And I’m always acutely aware that the camera I’m using costs more than most of my subjects earn in a year.

           

We tend to think of photographs as magical windows into other places, allowing us to see with our own eyes a village in Bolivia, a school in Chad.  But every photograph has been taken by someone who has chosen to represent reality in a certain way, consciously or unconsciously cropping out much that is essential to full understanding. This is crucial to keep in mind when looking at photographs of poverty and people who are poor.  Far too often, photographs in the aid genre depict their subjects as exotic tribespeople whose pitiful sufferings can be alleviated only by the charity of westerners.  We as donors are distanced from the objects of our pity so that we have to reach down to “help” them instead of walking and working together with them.  Stripped of their humanity, they become a means of serving our own self-satisfaction.  Photographers can unconsciously perpetuate these harmful perceptions, and I feel the weight of all these considerations every time I take a picture in the field. 

I’m thinking in particular of a visit I made recently with colleagues to a family that had received a one-time gift of food support earlier this year.  Most of our projects in Nepal involve working together with communities to develop food security, offering support and training rather than straightforward gifts of food, so this visit had a distinctly different feel than the others I’ve been on.  It was a chilly day up in the hills south of Kathmandu, and we stood outside this family’s modest cottage, shivering in the cold and the clouds that almost engulfed us.  The father of the family patiently answered all our questions about the aid he had received, about his children, about how hard they all had to work to make ends meet.  I pulled out my camera and took one picture.  Then I put the camera away, unable even to contemplate taking more.  I felt, frankly, foolish.  It wasn’t that I was ashamed that my organization had helped to alleviate this family’s hunger – not at all.  But I was very keenly aware of the enormous gulf of experience that lay between their lives and mine, and I felt that it shouldn’t be so.  It seemed suddenly wrong to take pictures of them from across the gulf, and share those pictures with people who were also on my side.  Image 1: Poor family grateful for food we gave them.  Good job, us. 

I’m trying to express my discomfort as clearly as I can.  I think it’s excellent and admirable to donate to organizations like MCC and that more people should do it.  And it’s excellent and admirable to try to educate people in North America about the realities of life in other parts of the world.  Taking photographs of development work helps to accomplish both these goals.  It’s a good thing, but also a difficult thing.  I don’t want to be a spectator, either of poverty or of its alleviation.  I want to be a partner, and I think that most people who support humanitarian aid and development work feel the same way.  Yet photographs, while essential for engaging people in this work, necessarily create both spectators and spectacles.  And taking photographs makes me – if only for a moment – a bystander who coolly observes and documents human grief.

I don’t have a solution to this dilemma.  I’m certainly not going to stop taking photographs, except in the moments when conscience pricks me to put the camera away.  To those pricks of conscience I’m going to try to become more sensitive, rather than less.  And I’m going to try to be a more repsonsible and ethical semi-photojournalist.  Nonetheless, I think the feeling of foolishness won’t go away – which is probably a good thing.  There is a sort of ridiculousness about what I do, if you think about it.

In The Field

The house we stayed in

A few days ago I woke up in a little house on stilts, in a tiny village at the top of a high hill in the middle of the jungle, and asked myself: "How on earth did I get here?"  Well, here's how.

Early Wednesday morning, I took a flight from Kathmandu to Biratnagar (Nepal's second-largest city, in the southeast) with four colleagues from MCC and one of our Nepali partner agencies.  Our purpose was to visit some projects MCC is supporting in villages in Morang District, in the areas of food security, vocational training, and rural education.  It was my first time going on a field visit, and in the future I'll be going on many more.

Meeting with farmers at a food security project

We spent our three days in the field meeting with partners and visiting their development projects.  We met students in a vocational training program and heard about how their new skills have changed their aspirations for the future; took a tour around a food security project aimed at empowering landless labourers; and visited a remote village school to see firsthand the effects teacher training and parents' education have had on students' learning.  My job was to talk to people, hear their stories, and take lots of pictures.  Now that I'm back, I'll be putting these materials together into an article or two, with the intention of raising public awareness about the remarkable work MCC and our partner agencies are doing here in Nepal.

Meeting with students, teachers, and parents at Sagma School. 

For me, being in the field was almost like being in another country (again) - it was so unlike the neighbourhood where I live in Kathmandu.  The culture, language, and geography of Morang are very different from those of the capital city.  Moreover, the rural villages we visited were, as far as I could tell, largely free of western influence.  People carried on their lives - working, playing, hanging out with friends and relatives - in much the same way that their great-great-grandparents did before them.  And yet, as with all the places I've been so far in Nepal, the ancient and the modern coexist in the villages: while some village residents were doing a traditional dance for us, for example, some others were filming the performance on their cellphones.

I felt very privileged to be given a glimpse into the lives of the people we met.  I was struck by the resilience, dignity, warmth, and good humour that I saw in all of them.  I was especially overwhelmed at being given a gift - a little wooden model of Nepal - by the managers of the school we visited.  I really felt (and still feel) I'd done nothing to deserve such generosity.

We had some delightful misadventures along the way.  After spending our first day on the Terai (plains) in southern Morang, we traveled north to visit the school in the hills.  Once we left the plain, the road got very rough very fast, and after about an hour of bumping, jostling, pushing the jeep, and occasionally rebuilding the road, our driver refused to go any further, and left us by the roadside in the middle of the jungle.  Fortunately, we were able to arrange for a jeep from the school to come pick us up, but we had to wait there for two hours before it reached us.  In the meantime we ate bananas and befriended some lost goats.

Ditched!

When the second jeep came, we thought our difficulties were behind us - but after another hour of even rougher road, now with lots of steep switchbacks, the driver stopped abruptly, got out, and began working on one of the wheels.  Apparently it wasn't turning properly – no biggie!  He messed around with it a little, took it off the axle, put it back on, and then we continued on our way, feeling slightly less confident that we would reach our destination alive.  A bit later the driver stopped again, and - fortunately, from my perspective - decided it wasn’t actually safe to go any further with a malfunctioning wheel, so we had to call the school to send us another jeep, and killed a little more time in the jungle.  Finally we reached the village, all in one piece, and the return journey was smoother (in the sense of being less interrupted - the road was equally as bumpy!).

 So, I’m looking forward to getting a chance to go to the field again next week.  This is a side of Nepal that most foreigners never get a chance to see, and, much as I enjoy the creature comforts available in Kathmandu, I really appreciate the opportunity to visit the people MCC is working with in rural communities.  There are challenges – the ever-present language barrier, the risk of food poisoning, the leech-infested outhouses (!) – but the joys are greater.  Bumping and jostling down the jungle roads in that death-trap of a jeep, looking out over spectacular vistas of steep, misty valleys, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.