Global Lens Reflections on life, the universe, and everything
Picture of the Week
Net girl
In response to last week’s photo, I had two people write me to ask why the family of the boy who died didn’t have bed nets to prevent the transmission of malaria. I responded that it’s not that simple. I've had malaria, and it’s no fun. I had a good friend die of malaria. As […]
Selling nets
Zacarias Moses died last night. He was 8 years old. I met him yesterday when I saw his grandmother carry his unconscious body into a hospital in Wau, South Sudan. I followed and photographed Moses, who was suffering from malaria, as the nurses cared for him. After a while, a prolonged series of convulsions stopped […]
Marketing violence
The rants of crazed Republicans in the United States about the legitimacy of rape has reminded me of the struggle of women in India against a blame-the-victim mentality that still plagues both gender relationships and the attitudes of public security officials, as documented in this recent article. Here’s a billboard from Varanasi I found a […]
Roma girls
Pressing the shutter button is the easy part of photography. I’m currently in Macedonia, part of a several-nation journey to write about and photograph Roma communities in Europe. Last week I was in Serbia, and one day went to a collection of containers plunked down in the middle of nowhere outside of Belgrade. The metal […]
Not peddling misery
Images of hungry children are commonly used by all sorts of organizations to touch the heart of the viewer and thus convince them to give money to the cause. Churches are pretty adept at the practice, what I disgustingly call “peddling misery.” The antidote, however, isn’t to not take photos of hungry children, not if […]
Mother’s love
It’s back to school time for many children in North America, so this week I’m thinking about people like Mariolette Souffrant, a woman living in a tent city in the Mais Gate neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Here she is one morning helping her son Lucien get dressed for school. The four-year old is a student […]
Laughing woman
It was one of those interminable hot days in the tropics. I’d eaten a big lunch and was sleepy, yet my local hosts were enthusiastic about showing me another six projects before sunset. I bounced around in the Land Cruiser as they drove me to a couple of projects where people were growing and processing […]
Elbow angles
Photography is about hard work and persistence, but also a bit of luck. Here’s an image from a 2010 assignment in Tamil Nadu, in southern India. I was in the small village of Poonthandalam, photographing some children in a church-sponsored after school tutoring program. It was late in the day, nice light, and interesting subjects. […]
Rain girl
I’ve always admired the great portrait photographers, people who could get someone to sit in front of them and then capture an image which—in the same fraction of a second—also captures some of that person’s character, or soul, or personality. A good portrait is more than just a collection of pixels representing the outline and […]
Positive family
This image wraps up my month-long focus on HIV and AIDS, and I chose it because it shows the face of the epidemic: ordinary people. I was in India in 2010 and spent several days photographing HIV-related work for the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance around Chennai, including support groups, a church-sponsored clinic, and the daily lives […]
Dancing condom
I'm currently covering the XIX International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC, especially the participation of the faith community. I've covered previous IACs in Bangkok, Mexico City, and Vienna. It's always a whirlwind of activity, with more than 20,000 researchers, care givers, people living with the virus, media, activists, pharma reps, and so on. It's exciting […]
Heroic care
Although much of the news at this year’s International AIDS Conference, which is about to get underway in Washington, DC, focuses on progress toward finding a vaccine or cure for the disease, those who struggle on the front lines against the pandemic often get ignored. There are hundreds of thousands of home-based caregivers who are […]
HIV dance
Accompanied by drummers, a young woman dances in the streets of Sathangudi, a rural southern Indian village, to invite residents to a play about HIV and AIDS. She displays the enthusiasm that many young people bring to the task of raising awareness of the virus and how to avoid it. Her group is sponsored by […]
HIV letter
Part of the story about HIV and AIDS which is not reported enough are those myriad acts of everyday solidarity and advocacy carried out by ordinary people who may not themselves be directly affected by the virus. Here’s a boy in a 7th grade class of the Isaacson Primary School in the Rockville neighborhood of […]
Be prepared
I was recently at a meeting where a church-based AIDS program made a presentation about its work. I was struck by how the photographs that it used had an inordinate number of people who were sick looking, as well as scenes of white people handing things to black people. For many, those images become the […]
No hands
I'm way behind on work, deadlines whizzing by, and am stuck in Pasco, Washington, for a five-day meeting. I'm feeling sorry for myself because I want to participate fully in the meeting, I want to spend time visiting with colleagues, and yet I keep sneaking back to the hotel room to crank out text. So […]
Young accomplices
The subjects of my images are often unindicted co-conspirators in their creation. Take this image, for example, of some boys scavenging in the municipal garbage dump in Chennai, in the south of India. I met them in a shelter sponsored by a local ecumenical group. I was in Chennai in 2010 shooting images of their […]
Unarmed resilience
The few times I’ve found myself trapped in close quarters with marketing professionals, I’ve nonetheless learned a thing or two. Take logos, the visual graphic that “symbolizes” a particular brand. The Nike swoosh, for example. What exactly does it stand for? What does it mean? Marketing gurus would prefer that you answer that question yourself. […]
Haiti dancers
This week I continue the occasional example of showing how an image was used. Here’s a photo from last August. I was in Haiti, covering several things, and I went to the village of Mizak for a few days. While there I shot photos of the Nouvel Etwal, a girls’ dance group that’s part of […]
Accompaniment
Usually I go back a ways in picking each week’s photo, but let’s break the rules this week and use one I captured on Monday, when I was in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. I spent a couple of days documenting the work of Gary and Cindy Moon, who are Korean-American United Methodist missionaries who’ve […]
Gaza girls
After last week’s image from below, I thought I’d continue the theme. Here’s an image I captured in Gaza, during the physical education class of a girl’s school in the Jabalyia refugee camp. At a time when it remains fashionable in the U.S. to demonize and dehumanize Palestinians, particularly Palestinian Muslims, it’s a visual reminder […]
From the depths
In 2007 I was shooting in the Darfur region in western Sudan, where government-sponsored violence, what many considered genocide, had killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven millions from their homes into crowded displacement camps in Darfur and across the border in Chad. In any desert region, a well is a point of gathering, […]
Thugs
When I heard this week that the hatemongers from Westboro Baptist Church were coming to the United Methodist General Conference in Florida, an event I was covering for the denomination’s news service, I felt caught in a dilemma. I’ve photographed these idiots before, and they are beyond despicable. And yet every time a photographer shows […]
Cold Belgrade
I found Sofija Arbanac and her 3-year old daughter Caka huddled under a blanket inside their meager home in an unauthorized Roma settlement in Belgrade, Serbia, during a February visit. It was unseasonably cold, and many poor folks were having a hard time, including this family. Besides the cold, Arbanac and her family had just […]