"Bonjour le blanc"
“Good morning white man”. The standard salutation, normally said with genuine warmth, that you will receive in Burkina Faso. A reminder of where you come from, which, to all intents and purposes, might as well have been a different planet.
I’m back from Burkina after working on a collaboration with Bristol-based charity Tree Aid in the Sahel region of the country for three weeks. Ouagadougou, the capital, is only a relatively short hop on a plane from Heathrow, via Casablanca. Interestingly, it is not the cacophony of sounds and smells that invade you as soon as you step off the plane or the seemingly chaotic environment you throw yourself into that shock you. It is the fact that the country operates within the same time zone as the UK. And without the benefit of jetlag and the natural disorientation that it brings, you land in Burkina wondering what your friends and family back home will be doing exactly as the same time as you, in that planet called the UK.
And what’s the first thing that you do when you arrive in Burkina for a photographic collaboration with an NGO? Well before you take a single image you buy a mobile phone with a local service provider. Your contacts, your well-being really, depend on that little handset that you buy for £20. Because the reality of professional reportage in places like Burkina is that you cannot do it on your own. Liaising with local NGOs, partners of those back in the UK, is crucial. In my case, SEMUS, ADECUSS and AFRS provided the necessary logistical and human resources for me to move around in places when at times it was difficult to find somewhere you could eat. The northern Sahel region of the country has practically no infrastructure. A 60-mile journey into the interior means a bone-breaking trip in a goods-come-people-carrier lorry on sandy and potholed dirt roads. You arrive at your destination, shaken and caked in dust, and the customary “Bonjour le blanc” reassures you that you are the only European around. Children quickly shout “Nasaara”, meaning white man, and your hopes for a low-key, anonymous arrival quickly vanish.
And it is in that context that you need to pull your expensive camera out of your expensive Crumpler rucksack and start pointing it at people there. A violent act at the best of times. Martha Rosler, in his classic article In, around and afterthoughts on documentary photography – worth reading in its entirety – argued that:
“Documentary, as we know it, carries information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful”
And that quote didn’t stop hovering around in my head for the three weeks I worked in Burkina. Only the conviction that I was doing a legitimate job managed to lower down the voice of my own conscience. Yes, I think I was doing a legitimate job by working on a brief to supply images on a varierty of development and environmental topics to Tree Aid. Then I read one of the image requirements I was given:
- Happy healthy children eating, the younger and smilier the child the better
In all fairness to Tree Aid, an organisation I am very fond of and with a proven track record in West Africa, this came from a freelance PR consultant who had never been in Burkina. Because had she been to Burkina she couldn’t have possibly missed, for example, the swarms of children carrying old tomato tins who wait for you to finish your meal and sweep your leftovers into their tins – only one child achieves it; he then subsequently flees the scene followed by the other children who try to get the leftovers off him.
So what John Berger said in his book Ways of Seeing is very true:
“[photographs of smiling peasants prove that]…the poor are happy and the better off are a source of hope for the world”
Putting your camera in front of someone’s face when you are very much aware of the radically different worlds you and they belong to – and so are they – demands a great deal of conviction in the usefulness and legitimacy of reportage and documentary photography. Something that I positively believe in. But part of me also thinks…”why don’t we actually train local people to do their own documentary, to have their own voice, and tell us about it?”
It wouldn’t work, would it? It is the Western photographer who knows the sense of aesthetics of a Western audience and the style of the imagery that they expect to see. It is the Western photographer who shares a cultural understanding of visual material with their audience.
Could it be otherwise I wonder?
11 thoughts on “"Bonjour le blanc"”
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I think that local people can do their own documentary and that it does work. I lived in Nepal for a few years and ran a series of basic photo workshops (6) for the local people. There was a mixture of people, men and women between 17 and 62, most of them were working, some in better jobs such as maids and gardeners, others in a much poorer situation. None of them had cameras. Manchester Metropolitan University donated 12 compact cameras which had been upgraded and sat in a cupboard for two years, so all twelve of ‘the group’ had there own camera to use. I taught them the basics and then set them exercises which they fulfilled in their own time. They learned very quickly what type of image worked but most importantly their images were much more impartial than ours, they photographed what was there, what was real and important to them and in many cases I found these impartial images were stronger than those taken by a western photographer who is always searching for an angle, we show what we expect others to want, they show what is really there. As an example….. In a photograph taken by Amir a 24yr old man who sometimes works selling brushes there is a shack made of old planks of wood and plastic bags, inside there is very little, a small circle of stones containing burnt out embers, a metal pan and plates, a worn mattress, and a pile of clothes neatly folded on top of a cardboard box. The only piece of furniture is a chair, it is a solid wooden chair and it has a brightly coloured cushion with tassels hanging down the side, it looks out of place in the poor surroundings. The photograph was titled ‘my grandmothers chair’ I had asked ‘the group’ to photography the most important thing in their home. It was a beautiful photograph, though perhaps it didn’t have the ‘big eyed puppy dog’ appeal required by charities, but in the poor surroundings it did have a message.
”why don’t we actually train local people to do their own documentary, to have their own voice, and tell us about it?”
Is it not that the “locals” have no network to distribute their photographs? The outsider has a personal project or a job to do that will always have the idea of a show, book, money and the justification of ‘helping the “other” by exposing their needs’ behind it.
Whilst I agree that photography can be a very beneficial educational tool in itself, In a village where basic amenities are lacking, how would they justify becoming photographers without physical monetary benefit to the community? How would these images reach a wider audience and would their message be about a photographer’s vision or just be treated as a quaint novelty?
Maybe the real issue is, if the ‘others’ voices (through their imagery) are heard on their own we don’t get to see what we want, we would get their truth, do we want it, are we interested? Finally, as western photographers how would we be perceived as intrepid and artistic if we didn’t earn it on the backs of the ‘others”?
It’s a deep topic and a tough assignment, thanks for sharing Jose.
A “problem” in documentary performed by the local people of such an area would be that of life experience. A Western photographer will go to the area and photograph what they see in a certain way in order to tell a story though images to his chosen audience.
A local person will take different photographs, as mentioned above, and these will be fascinating in themselves but will need to be explained. As a Western man, my experience of their culture is extremely limited and without explanation they do not make sense, or at least do not make the right sense.
Both approaches would have their appeal, but obviously for a charity they need something with the ability to make an immediate impact as, especially in todays time limited society, if something doesn’t hit home in the first second or two, then the opportunity has passed and we move on. We may not have the time to take on board the photographs from another viewpoint, and the local view becomes more specialised in its target audience.
But does a charity really want documentary photography in the ‘social documentary’ sense that we would understand the term? I suspect that what they really want is advertising photography to make their product appear in its best light to the audience that they are addressing. In order to do their job properly they need the funds etc. from the people, in this case, of Britain so the images need to be those that will strike a chord with those people and make them put their hands in their pocket. I don’t mean to imply any criticism of this, it is more realism than cynicism. Even Dr Bernardo knew this in the 19th century when the charity for the homeless children needed funds they took photos of the children they found sleeping rough but found that they were not striking the right chord with the potential doners so they had to dress and dirty up children that had been in the home a while rather tan use those straight from the streets. It caused a scandal at the time but it had brought in more funds and so they had been able to do better work.
Facts need interpretation and truth is often a cultural construct. For those of us in the West, the first encounter with post-colonial theory and criticism can be a sobering thing.
Having done some work for a cancer charity over a couple of years I took the position that I wanted to portray the clients and the workers as, first and foremost, human beings working together collectively and in empathy, rather than experts and their subjects.
So although overridingly the theme was one of hope, of course, I tried to gather a mix of emotions and moments that one wouldn’t normally associate with the expected cliches.
Very thought provoking.There is a charity that does what you suggest, although I’ve never seen any of their output advertised. http://www.photovoice.org/
“It wouldn’t work, would it? It is the Western photographer who knows the sense of aesthetics of a Western audience and the style of the imagery that they expect to see.”
In the context of images to promote the work of a charity, I think this is true, the images do a job and that’s the way it is. But in the wider arena I’m uncomfortable with the idea that “a Western audience should be given the style of imagery they expect to see”.
I don’t know how one stops the natural human inclination to divide the world into them and us, but one way to begin might be to stop giving people images of what one thinks that they expect to see and start giving them images of the “others” different versions of reality.
“I don’t know how one stops the natural human inclination to divide the world into them and us”
Can that ever happen? I certainly don’t see it happening in my lifetime, I guess that in the future worlds portrayed by some authors, there might not be Western and Third Worlds, but can we get rid of rich and poor? By our very nature, we’re tribal and even if you can dissolve or blur the major boundaries, there will still be something (Arsenal and Spurs, Liverpool and Everton are “local” examples from football, and this type of thing will be everywhere)
There have been changes though, more things are photographed and people travel more, so we are exposed to different cultures. I’m reasonably well travelled and look at huge numbers of images, but at the end of the day, I’m a man from the north of England, and that takes some getting rid of in terms of how I look at the world.
Have to agree with Rob’s rather pessimistic view of this. I think we are almost tribal by nature. Not that that means we shouldn’t try.
To be honest i think there is room for both approaches – after all, it’s only an assumption that the Western world would not accept alternative aesthetics. I don’t think you have to belong to a tribe to understand that tribes viewpoint – at least on an intellectual level. If we aren’t given the chance we’ll never know. On a personal level I’ve started listening to some Indian music – to start with it’s a real challenge, but once you get used to the different sound it is just as engaging as western music – I imagine photography would be the same – although the kind of photography that comes out of say, Japan, does not appear that different visually from stuff that comes from Europe. Perhaps I’ve not seen enough, or perhaps it’s self-censoring. It’s difficult to tell, but the differences in photography certainly seem smaller than the differences in other arts.
Well it seems to me that the vast majority of people have a need to belong and one of the ways of defining what we belong to is by identifying what we don’t belong to.
Disparate peoples can sense a commonality in belonging through the identification of a common enemy; a strategy that’s been used by governments through out the ages to bind people together in common cause.
one of the great problems for us in the West and particularly us in the UK is the legacy left to us of imperialism. The ineptitude of our great and glorious government over the ‘diplomats’ incident in Libya is just one example. Try reading Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Face, White Mask for an introduction to post colonial thinking in the making.