שני ציטוטים בעניין אפריקה, דעות קדומות, קלישאות ופוטוג'ורנליזם (ההדגשות שלי).
הראשון נכתב ע"י Emmy כתגובה לאחד הפוסטים ב-Duckrabbit:
השני הוא קטע מתיאורו של הצלם Marco Vernaschi את האזור בו הוא מצלם במערב אפריקה:
החליטו אתם למי אתם מאמינים.
הראשון נכתב ע"י Emmy כתגובה לאחד הפוסטים ב-Duckrabbit:
...It reminds me of when i worked as a fixer for foreign photographers who came to South Africa before the world cup. I was appalled by their ignorance, prejudices, and disrespect. They knew nothing about the country (sorry when you haven’t bothered looking up the name of the party in power of the country you are visiting, I’m afraid you are ignorant), and literally asked to prepare topics that were ultimately clichés. So they had already decided to stage their stories before landing in the country. It took a lot of time to convince them that South Africa is more than rape, crime, and HIV. These are obviously valid topics to work on, they reflect a rough reality. But when you are being asked to “cast” someone according to his/her colour or gender (ie: “please make sure it is a black person and a woman”)it obviously provides a very skew version of the reality and victimize people who don’t need to be condemned to a second death, that of their identity.
Once the shoot is done, the photographers sometimes go as far as assuming they don’t need a written authorization of the people who were photographed: “ah, come on, they live in a shack, they dont have internet, it’s not like they gonna sue me”.
This is, for me, condemning a country to remain a cliché, and to sentence a people to be second zone citizens for the rest of their life. This is the ultimate insult from photographers with superior complex. it is also providing enormous space for photographers to alter the reality of events they supposedly witnessed.
These are obviously photojournalists that participate in conveying post colonial stereotypes. I believe, maybe naively, they are still professionals who have work ethics. But I imagine that the eagerness to win awards, and the bad health of the photo industry doesn’t help.
West Africa, a region that has barely begun to heal from a decade of civil wars, is once again under attack. The new threat grows silently, like a cancer, while the international community appears powerless to respond.
An international network led by Latin American drug cartels and the Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah has chosen West Africa, among the poorest and more corrupted corners of the world, as the nexus for illegal trade in cocaine, oil, counterfeit medicines, pirated music and human trafficking. International law enforcement officials say the profits fuel terrorist activities worldwide.
The past three years has seen a staggering increase in drug trafficking in particular, making West Africa - and especially the countries of Guinea Bissau, Nigeria, Ghana and Guinea - the premier narcotics region of Africa. The consequences are most visible in Guinea Bissau, which saw the double assassination of its president and army chief on the same day in early March and more recently the murder of two leading politicians in the struggle for succession.
The consequences stretch as well to the slums of Bissau, where crack-fueled prostitution is driving a new AIDS epidemic in a region where basic even basic health care is beyond the reach of many, to the young people turning to the drug trade become unwitting soldiers of organized crime.
What's happening in Guinea-Bissau, Africa's first narco-state, is a red flag of warning for the region - and for the world.
Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new and they will hate you for it.
George Monbiot
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