Beyond ‘Safari’: Africa Journeys

Beyond ‘Safari’ – approaches to photographing Journeys

The word ‘safari’ means journey in Swahili from the Arabic root ‘safar’ travel. It was used by colonial powers in Africa to refer to game hunts. This meaning is now being changed by African governments and tour companies to refer more to eco-travel to photograph national parks, and also to African tourism more generally. This shift does not however remove either political concerns, or the colonial overtones.

There are intensely conflicting interests between large private companies and/or governments and local people about the use of national parks as a generation of revenue. Although some national parks are managed in the interests of local people as well as animals, farmers living in or on the boundaries of the parks often have their livelihoods and crops decimated by incursions of animals – particularly where the areas are not large enough for the animal populations and/or where poaching and illegal logging and other types of exploitation by large vested interests are also involved.

Moreover the tourists are generally from rich nations eager to find a ‘lost wilderness’ where animals are free in a way that would not be permitted at home as for example in opposition to reintroduction of wolves and bears in Western Europe. For these tourists the people are often secondary. Aiming to ‘shoot’ photos (Sontag) and capture as many memories of the exotic as possible to take home. Leading to ossification of ‘quaint’ cultural traditions. eg pygmies etc. The focus is on difference rather than human similarities. It is also far from clear that the foreign appreciation of ‘wilderness’ corresponds to local perceptions of ‘beautiful landscape’ or indeed the types of landscapes encouraged by global commodity companies or development agencies where the focus is more on efficient and in some cases sustainable agricultural practices.

This review is an attempt to work through implications for my own work. I travel a lot for work, but unlike professional photographers I am employed to do a job training people in local communities in participatory methodologies. As such I do have privileged access to the views and issues facing local people and people in the organisations working with them.  But, like a tourist, I have fleeting opportunities to do more contextual landscape or environmental work. The questions that really interest me in order to make the best of the opportunities I have is:

  • what can one learn from this type of ‘safari’ – are there things that one can do with the idea of journey in terms of understanding and contextualising images that cannot be done through staying and studying one place (as for example in ‘space to place’ and ‘transitions’).
  • what can these fleeting impressions on the move show? are the issues of photographing journeys in Africa necessarily different from in UK? is one necessarily any more an ‘outsider’ – in UK I am often travelling through new or forgotten places. In Africa there is always the driver to consult and I often travel with NGO staff some of whom are local, and also talk to the people I am training. Bearing in mind much of the colonial conditioning we all have.
  • what are the implications for different approaches and different techniques? what does this mean for planning my trip?

In deciding how to portray particular landscape/s key considerations are:

  • Who created, owns, uses and changes this landscape? How do these people relate to each other?
  • How is this ‘landscape’ distinguished from other similar places (who decides what is and what is not similar? by what criteria? why are those criteria important?)?
  • How do (different) users and inhabitants of a place feel towards (different aspects of) the landscape (pride, indifference, disrespect, fear of loss)?
  • What attitudes do (which) outsiders have towards it?

Underlying all these considerations must also be a consideration of:

  • How are these feelings, identities and relationships manipulated, why and by whom? (See Part 3 landscape as political text)
  • Self-awareness on the part of the photographer of their own identity/ies and assumptions and power/desire (or lack of it) to manipulate and change things.

This review considers what can be learned from professional photographers, African and non-African and my own experience from this course in an attempt to move beyond ‘travel photography’ to ways of photographing journeys that can discover and communicate more about the places and people ‘outside the window’. It reviews a number of different types of image series taken on journeys before, during and since Assignment 2. These include:

  • ‘Free safari’: Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda – taken before Assignment 2 and the closest to common understandings of ‘safari’ though taken as we travelled along the main road rather than paying to go through the national park itself.
  • ‘Urban voyeur safari’ taken from the car as I returned from rural areas back to the capital city through peri-urban areas in Kenya and Ivory Coast. Looking at how far this type of photography can say something about African urban life – compared to eg Paul Seawright’s Invisible Cities.
  • ‘Objective Safari’: Journey through Sumatra in Indonesia where I alternated my approach between ‘subjective’ framing and automatic ‘objective’ clicking the shutter at intervals of 3 seconds as I moved through urban areas to see the different effects this gave.
  • Documentary safari: Journeys to communities in Rwanda and Tanzania (3-5 series) I was with both local NGO staff and/or local drivers and had more opportunity to stop, get out and consider ‘shots’ and also to travel off the normal tourist routes and see things more from the local perspective. Including one journey with local people to select what they considered the best photo spot for a picture for a calendar they had asked me to produce. And one journey where I focused on the contrast between my transport and they way local people travelled. One other journey for Gesture and Meaning Assignment 1 I used manual focus to speed up the camera reaction time.

 

‘Free safari’: Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

– taken before Assignment 2 and the closest to common understandings of ‘safari’ though taken as we travelled along the main road rather than paying to go through the national park itself.

‘Urban voyeur safari’: peri-urban areas in Kenya and Ivory Coast.

taken from the car as I returned from rural areas back to the capital city through  Looking at how far this type of photography can say something about African urban life – compared to eg Paul Seawright’s Invisible Cities.

‘Objective Safari’:  Sumatra in Indonesia

See: http://www.zemniimages.com/Photography/Documentary/Indonesia 

where I alternated my approach between ‘subjective’ framing and automatic ‘objective’ clicking the shutter at intervals of 3 seconds as I moved through urban areas to see the different effects this gave.

Semendo to Bataraja: Series 1

Semendo to Baturaja: Series 4

Semendo to Baturaja selected images from random series

Semendo to Baturaja considered images

 

 

Documentary safari: Rwanda, Tanzania and Kyrgyzstan

Journeys to communities in Rwanda and Tanzania (3-5 series) I was with both local NGO staff and/or local drivers and had more opportunity to stop, get out and consider ‘shots’ and also to travel off the normal tourist routes and see things more from the local perspective. Including one journey with local people to select what they considered the best photo spot for a picture for a calendar they had asked me to produce. And one journey where I focused on the contrast between my transport and they way local people travelled. One other journey for Gesture and Meaning Assignment 1 I used manual focus to speed up the camera reaction time.
TASK

Write a project proposal for the self-directed project that you’ll submit as Assignment Five. Don’t write more than 500 words. The purpose of this document is to formulate and communicate your ideas to your tutor, for
them to approve and provide comments, suggestions and any other feedback.

The project proposal is not a binding contract. It is quite acceptable for it to evolve and perhaps shift direction; this is part of the creative process. However, you may find it helpful to think of the document as a real-life professional application for funding, or for permission to photograph at a restricted location.

See Designing a project brief for guidelines

The project brief: What, where, how and why am I photographing this subject?

My main aim is to look at different ways of selecting and editing the same sets of images for different purposes: eg documentary, expressive and tourist and how different impressions can be given through different design of books and on-line slideshows. I will explore the use of black and white and what effects this has on interpretation of the images.

I am proposing to use images from my forthcoming 3 week work trip to Ethiopia (November) to take further issues in documentary travel photography raised in Assignment 4. My work is to look at the horticulture value chain, and how the incomes of women in particular can be increased. My work involves training farmers and union/cooperative members and I will be staying most of the time in one community (but I do not yet know what accommodation will be like). As part of this I should be able to negotiate some time specifically for photography to support my work.

 

Influences and research

I will research further on African photographers (including Michael Tsegaye and make enquiries from colleagues about other Ethiopian photographers). I will also research different Black and White styles eg some photobooks I have from Lithuania and Marcus Bleasdale.

Likely treatment: How will you photograph this subject? What special techniques or equipment will you use? Do you need any further training? Do you need or have you got a ‘plan B’ in case something doesn’t work?

The treatment will depend very much on what I manage to do – I will have to be flexible. But my ideas will develop and evolve as part of my professional work. I do not currently have a visual idea of the context, and there is no means of getting this in advance. But I see it as including photographs of:

  • rural and peri-urban landscapes and related environmental issues
  • documentary portraits of farmers, union/cooperative leaders and NGO staff and maybe traders
  • a visual and/or verbal analysis of the power relations that bind them.

Before I go I will practise using on-camera fill-flash. But most photos will be taken in natural light with my existing equipment (including tripod).

If in the end I cannot take the photographs I want here because of other work priorities, then plan B is to use one or more sets of existing photos taken earlier this year (eg Kyrgyzstan and/or Ivory Coast and/or Tanzania) and/or photographs from a trip to Nigeria in January (though this is not so long in the community, I have a long road journey that is likely to be interesting).

Any of this will provide adequate material to look at issues in Book Design and Web slideshows. And to think through further my ideas on journeys and documentary from the previous Assignment.

Potential outcome

I am planning to self-publish the book (for my own use at least – possibly for the development agencies I am working with) on Blurb and have been experimenting already – based on work for my Visual Communications Book Design course.

I will also add a Slideshow to my Zemni website – possibly with several different slideshows for different purposes.

As part of this I will also tidy up the whole travel and documentary section of my website.

• Budget/resources: What will you need to spend, or what other resources will you require to complete the work? How will you access these?

No extra resources needed except to pay for Blurb.

• Estimated schedule: Identify the different phases of this work and set realistic deadlines to achieve them by. It is often helpful to do this by identifying the final deadline and working backwards.

Taking photos in November.

Completion by end first week of January – or end of February after I get back from a separate trip to Nigeria.

 

Review:
A New Safari: some reflections on ‘shooting’  pdf

Cote d’Ivoire: Journey Zaranou to Abidjan

Kyrgyzstan: Journey Bishkek to Naryn

This review looks at challenges and potential ways forward in photographing journeys -issues I became interested in Assignment 2 but were left pending. It looks at ways I might approach ‘journeys’ in Africa and Asia, compared to the way I photograph journeys in UK – supposedly my ‘own’ society’. It briefly considers issues of ‘colonial gaze’ and travel photography. But it is more concerned with wider issues of tensions between subjectivity and objectivity in landscape photography, and the implications for an ‘enlightened’ and relatively informed approach to photographing journeys as a process of exploration and discovery, then selection and interpretation – inevitably raising political questions about what I am photographing and why. It makes substantial use of my own photographs of journeys taken before and during my work on this course, placing these in the context of other African and Asian photographers as well as Western photographers who have depicted similar landscapes both as studied ‘documentary landscapes’ and as journeys/journey narratives. This review is partly a way of taking stock of the photographs I have and how they can be made more meaningful through selection, processing and narrative sequencing. Partly a way of comparing my images to those of professional photographers who have dealt with similar types of images.

It raises continuing issues to consider in my practice going forward in relation to any documentary photography: what am I trying to say, to whom, and why? The answers will vary depending on the types of journey in question – requiring careful thought about techniques that can be used in any one physical setting (light conditions, speed of travel, distance from subjects etc) and also the selection and sequencing of images as a narrative. In Assignment 5 I will experiment with different types of narrative that can be constructed from the same sets of images.

Links to African Photographers

Michael Tsegaye

Dillon Marsh

Link to all My Journeys

Rwanda: Gisenyi to Muhanga (May 2013) These were taken as one of the exercises for Gesture and Meaning Assignment 1 Documentary as an experiment in manual focusing. I used a zoom lens setting the ISO at 400-640 and aperture mostly at f/6.3 to get a reasonable depth of field. However from time to time I varied this when speed or distance made images too blurry. I found this technique interesting, and some of the blurry images quite atmospheric in their ‘rapid glimpse’ effect of people going past. But – partly because of my eyesight – I find manual focus difficult, and the approach rather too hit and miss.

Kenya: Thika to Nairobi airport (January 2015) Here I used a similar approach as for Cote d’Ivoire. I was struck by the interesting names of shops and hotels. The light was much brighter so I fixed the aperture at f/10 to give greater depth of field. However this proved too slow for many of the images, making them blurred. In this case (unlike Rwanda) I find it annoying. I think because the subjects are further away. I think this could be edited down and the photos themselves edited into a series focusing on shop signs only.

Cote d’Ivoire: Zaranou to Abidjan (August 2015) Photographs were taken frequently as soon as I saw ‘interesting’ images – mostly people, but also as I noticed more and more patterns I started to collect images of the innumerable billboards of women’s cosmetics and electronics – as well as rubbish and bad housing. They were taken at ISO400 with a 28mm wideangle fixed lens. In the town I fixed the aperture at its widest: f/1.8 to allow maximum shutter speed for the dull rainy season light – together with the fast car. Meaning that I had to be quick to focus exactly where I wanted for each image. I find quite a few of these images quite evocative in the contrast between sharp and blurred areas. This maintains the feeling of travelling, whilst still giving some focus. I could exploit this more with practice to create more deliberate meaning.

Indonesia : Sumatra (April 2016) The Portfolio images were taken in the conventional way – selecting the ‘picturesque’ while travelling or on travel stops while my Indonesian photographer friend also took photos. The Journey images experimented by taking photos at regular intervals while going through villages and urban areas – counting 10 between each press of the shutter and pointing in the same direction – giving a much more automatic random sequence. These are probably more ‘representative’ overall and did give some interesting images. It is interesting how many of the images have no people in – they were all in the fields at this time of day. Also the numbers of satellite dishes. On balance though I think that the approach in the Cote d’Ivoire sequence is more effective.

Kyrgyzstan (May 2016) This is my most recent series – reverting back to the method from Cote d’Ivoire but with an aperture setting of f/3.2. I maintained as much sharpness in all the images as possible – despite the unpredictable bumps in the road), often through shooting forward through the windscreen (atmospherically cracked). But I exaggerated the feeling of journey through including the window frame and cracks, as well as the driver in some of the images.

On the whole I find Kyrgyzstan the most successful of the series – along with Cote d’Ivoire. This is partly because of the subject matter itself. But also because keeping the aperture setting constant I can focus on the image. But in both taking and selecting the images I need to think carefully about what it is I am trying to say – I am not a neutral observer and it is important not to perpetuate stereotypes.


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