Popcap '13 Prize for Contemporary African Photography, Vernissage, Basel, June 2013
Public Comments on the Anhua Collective exhibit "Future Plan": portraits of former girl soldiers of the so-called Lord's Resistance Army, in Uganda.
Paul Jenkins
Edited version, 29th July 2013. <paul.jenkins@gmx.ch>
NB a gallery of "Future Plan" portraits by the photographers Alvaro Laiz and David Rengel, is available, with captions, at http://alvarolaiz.photoshelter.com/gallery/Future-Plan-Kony-s-Child-Soldiers-return-home/G0000HXGF2EG4XAM This includes – with a few additional images - the portraits discussed here.
For 150 years now NGOs have used photography to communicate situations in the non-western world with which they are concerned to people in the world's metropolitan cultures. They have used photography to back up their word communications by encouraging their potential supporters to visualise the people and processes to which they call attention. Photography in this sense is a means of enabling people "here" to picture to themselves the lives of their "distant neighbours" – people for whom our metropolitan existence may very well in some way be relevant, and for whom a change of behaviour or a conscious response on our side may prove important. Communication in this context is an open-ended effort to promote the understanding à distance of what is existentially important for specific groups of people far away.
Open-ended communication is one thing: advertising is another. With time NGOs' visual communication has not only attempted to communicate the real life situations in which other people live. It has also been strongly influenced by the development of modern advertising and its almost scientific use of types of images paired with pithy texts to drive readers' thoughts and actions in a desired direction. The image of a smiling non-western woman engaged in her traditional handiwork – a cliché in the advertising of secular and religious NGOs known now for at least a century - is, perhaps, a relatively innocent pitch for the attention of women in the West who are also passionate about the exercise of their own traditional handiwork. But heart-wrenching images of catastrophe raise much more complicated issues. And in a situation in which NGOs are in competition with one another for support, the use of such images can produce advertising overkill, "slap in the face photography" directed at the reader to obtain a strong reaction in support of specific activities. These may, of course, be worthy and effective. But they can also be highly specious.
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My reading of the portraits by the Anhua Collective of former child soldiers in Uganda, which were awarded a prize in Popcap'13, thus starts by trying to place them along the continuum between communication and advertising. Not that the Anhua Collective is an NGO - it is a collective of Spanish documentary photographers. But in concerning themselves with African despair and suffering, the Anhua Collective cannot avoid being evaluated in the general context of dramatic images of African catastrophe and the issues these raise.
Through contact with a large Western NGO working in Uganda[1] the photographers of the Anhua Collective first obtained an introduction to ex-child soldiers who had been kidnapped to live and fight with what is blasphemously called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The Spanish photographers developed this contact especially together with a former girl soldier who is now a social worker. With her, and other ex-child soldiers, the Anhua Collective developed the idea of the time with the LRA as a parenthesis, filled with violence, degradation and anomie, lying between a childhood spent with their families of origin, and their attempt to return to normal life as young adults, in spite of their terrible experiences and the stigma they bear. Out of this contact came the rubrik "Future Plans" on the portraits which, along with the parallel rubrik "What I have lost" structured the discussions during which the photographs considered here were taken.
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I am concerned with the large coloured portraits of former girl soldiers which were the main emphasis in the work exhibited in Popcap'13. And I give them excellent marks as open-ended communication rather than close-focussed advertising. The images promote reflective encounter à distance, rather than aiming at arousing viewers' strong emotions. Indeed, if these images call up strong responses on the part of viewers to the fate of the ex-child soldiers this will only be after the viewers have gone through their own process of encounter and questioning à distance.
The portraits portray their subjects with dignity, with a good balance between a distance which keeps the photographer from over-intimacy, and the closeness which allows for a portrait focussed on a specific person. The faces are relaxed, the postures natural, the groupings unforced. The whole ensemble is understated, undramatic; an element, only, of defiance in the portrait of Vicky; an element of patience in those of Florence Lakot, Alice and Margret. Only in the portrait of Florence Ako is there for me the hint of overwhelming unresolved sadness. The lack of self- or other-directed dramatisation is particularly noticeable. In this remote part of the world, too, TV will provide plenty of guidance on how an individual can project him- or herself in a striking way.
The portraits are, indeed, so far away from the visual clichés of suffering and despair we might expect, that the captions have a vital role to play in stimulating the encounter à distance. As they should, they tie the images to a time (if not, as I would prefer, to a precise date) - and to a region (if not, as I would prefer, to a precise place). But above all the captions tie the images to names and a glimpse of individual life-histories. It is because of the captions that our virtual encounter with the subjects can develop our understanding. We are not simply seeing people living in poverty and insecurity in an area of Africa with a long history of being threatened by disorder and civil war. We are confronted with the question specifically of what it means to be a young woman who is an ex-child soldier of the LRA.
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Here, now, is my personal "string" of thoughts laying out my encounter with what the Anhua Collective is communicating.
The bulk of the portraits of former girl soldiers shown in Basel were in fact group portraits of young women with children.
There is a singular atmosphere about these groups. These are not typical portraits of warm African motherhood. There is no eye-contact between mother and child, and much less body-contact than one might expect. But the explanation for this is easy to sense. We were told that all the young women have been in "normal society" for some years, but that their older children may be the children of violence and rape forced on them while they were still adolescents in the LRA. Equally, of course, some of them may be children who have lost their biological mother and been adopted by another mother-figure. Further, none of the young women are portrayed as living in a steady relationship with a man. But the stigma they carry and the impact of LRA violence on the "normal society" in which they live probably means that steady relationships are difficult to achieve. The portraits, in other words, bear evidence of a fractured society, of situations in which young women have to carve out their own way for themselves and their children.
But: for thousands of generations African cultures have faced the danger of demographic catastrophe through illness, war, famine, natural disasters and climate change. A well-known senior English historian of Africa calls Africans precisely the "frontiers[people] of the human race", in tribute to their survival in harsh and problematic environments. Arising from this, in African cultures, African women pursue motherhood single-mindedly, in a deeply-felt – if half-conscious - women's response to the constant danger that a population will need to be built up again after catastrophe. Indeed, in many parts of Africa women describe giving birth with its pain and dangers as "women's war", the women's risky part in ensuring the survival of their communities. An old African pastor, whose reports I have read, a puritan and disciplinarian, was nevertheless gentle in his approach to the very many girls he knew who conceived their first child out of wedlock. "There is something outstanding about having a child", he wrote - and everybody wants one. So we should pay attention to these understated and undemonstrative group portraits of mothers and children. They invite us to see in these ensembles the dead bones of shattered community being fused together and brought to life again. These women, having suffered the destruction of the community in which they were growing up, are engaged in the rebuilding of community through their relations with these children.
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You may feel I am building too much on a few photographs and some slippery steps of interpretation. Or that even if my upbeat interpretation about the restoration of community is right, one can scarcely be optimistic about the outcomes for the young women whose portraits I have been contemplating.
But look at the slide show referred to in the title to this comment, and especially that last portrait of Grace Arach, an LRA ex-girl soldier who, since her return to "normality", has been able to train as a social worker to accompany her sisters as they rebuild their lives. These young mothers are evidently not without support from people who have some idea about the impact on their own lives of the terrors and inhumanity they have experienced.
It is easy to be afro-pessimistic. But we need to learn to recognise determination when we see it. And we need to avoid underestimating the talents which people in Africa can apply to their lives, if only social, political and economic order is assured.
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So my compliments to the judges of the Popcap competition in 2013 for being prepared to step away, in their reading of this entry, from the idyllic or whimsical images offered by their other prize-winners - and being open to images generated in a troubled, troubling but very real milieu.
And my compliments to the Anhua Collective photographers who declined to hit us with "slap in the face" photography. Instead, with these portraits, they invite us to a process of thought, commuting, as it were, between image and caption. These understated and non-clichéed images, as I contemplated them, demanded I read the captions to understand who these people are, who give off such uncertain visual signals. And the captions sent me back to the images with all my antennae waving, in the attempt I have recorded here to appreciate these young women and understand how they cope with their terrible past.
Paul Jenkins b. in Great Britain in 1938, was 1965-72 was a Lecturer in History, University of Ghana; 1972-2003 archivist, Basel Mission; concurrently 1989-2003 part-time Lecturer in African History, University of Basel and co-leader of a pioneer project to organise the photo-holdings in the Basel Mission archive and make them internationally accessible online (<www.bmpix.org>). He has also published a number of essays on interpreting historical photographs taken in the context of christian missions.
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