Global Lens Reflections on life, the universe, and everything
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 […]
Philippines: Misery Mountain
High on the slopes of fog-draped Mt. Diwata, far above the Compostela Valley in northern Mindanao, more than 40,000 people cling to the hillsides because of what lies under the ramshackle community of Diwalwal. It’s gold, and since its discovery here by Mandaya indigenous people in the late 1970s, Diwalwal has resembled parts of California […]
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 […]
Photos in use
Here's another example of how an image was used. (Remember I promised in January that every once in a while I'll show how and where my images get used?) I picked this because when capturing images of people, I try hard to get their face, especially their eyes. That's usually what makes us interesting. But […]
South Sudan cook
Let’s talk today about dynamic range, the ratio between the maximum and minimum intensities of measurable light. Huh? It’s the continuum from light to dark that we can distinguish with our eyes. Our cameras are not as sensitive as our eyes when it comes to capturing dynamic range, so photographers spend a lot of time […]
Serbia: Roma struggle
Vita Stankovic lives with his wife Sofija Arbanac and their daughters Rada, 5, and Caka, 3, in a homemade ramshackle dwelling. It’s in the middle of a vacant lot but within sight of the new high-rise buildings that mark the post-war renaissance of Belgrade, Serbia. Stankovic and his family are Roma, also known as Gypsies, […]
Brazil: Remembering Dorothy
Antonia Silva Lima lives in a place called Hope. She came to the Amazon rainforest more than two decades ago, like hundreds of thousands of other migrants fleeing from poverty in other parts of Brazil. The settlers moved deep into the forest and cut down the trees to grow subsistence crops, only to be chased […]
Cairo family
Today is the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents, the day we remember the massacre of the children of Bethlehem by the army of an empire that was threatened by the birth of a child. To escape the violence, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Egypt, where they lived until Herod died. Despite all the […]
Ethiopian mother and child
In these final days of Advent, when we practice waiting, I remember this woman. In April 2000 I was in Gubalaftu, a poor village in the stark northern highlands of Ethiopia. I was covering the effect that a periodic drought had on families there. Some had received food from the Mekane Yesus Ethiopian Evangelical Church, […]
Palestinian pictures
Newt Gingrich paints himselfs as a "historian," but it's obvious that his recent reference to the Palestinians as an "invented" people, just as his claim that they are all "terrorists," is a lie so big that only the most ardent Fox News devotee, who knows less about the world than someone who doesn't watch any […]
Port au Prince posture
I'm a little late posting this week as I wandered off to New York City for three days, where among other things I signed copies of Rubble Nation, a new book on Haiti that I coauthored, at a reception in Manhattan. So I was thinking a bit about the images in the book and what […]
Advent waiting
Advent is a time when Christians practice the discipline of waiting. For many people in the world, however, waiting is more ordinary, the stuff of every day and not just special days. Waiting shapes who they are and how they see the world. For many who wait, impatience simply isn’t an option, perhaps because it’s […]
Enough stigma
In the last few years I’ve shot a lot of images related to HIV and AIDS. Because today is World AIDS Day, I wanted to pick just one. Would it be a care giver in Malawi, one of those unsung heroes on the front line of the war against suffering? Would it be an angry […]
Brave girl
I met Luong Hoai Thuong in 2007 when I was photographing in Vietnam. I was particularly interested in landmine survivors, and after a couple of days of capturing images of amazing adults who had lost their arms but could still manipulate a hoe in their fields or had lost legs but could still fish for […]