This photograph was taken in a hut in Ethiopia. The woman, who clearly has authority in her village, is old, but it is easy to see that she was once quite attractive and in fact, still is. Her sculpted features reveal character more than age. They are most visible in black and white. Her much younger daughter was also quite beautiful. The older woman could see that I had noticed that, and so she turned to me and said, “You are old. I am old. Why don’t we get married?” The message was clear. She had a lively intelligence that I found quite endearing. I asked her about life in the village today. “It used to be easy,” she said. “it’s not anymore.” Still, the woman and the village endured, as do we all.
Sometimes it is the reaction of people to each other that most reveals the reality of the moment. This photograph was taken in Bangladesh after a freak cyclone swept a 16-foot wall of water across villages and lives. These survivors of the natural disaster are waiting to receive emergency food. I was first struck by the intensity of the boy’s eyes and then by his freshly ironed shirt. His face is alert and he is prepared to act. In contrast, the women seated behind him seem barely conscious. The other boys look frightened or are staring off to the side. Not this boy. He is clearly a survivor and will most likely help to define the future.
These Somali school girls are in a refugee camp managed by CARE International at Dadaab, in Kenya, not far from the border with Somalia. Although the installations at Dadaab were built in response to an emergency, the region surrounding the camps is so poor that ordinary Kenyan villagers tried to slip into the camp to take advantage of the schooling and services, which were measurably better than those provided by Nairobi. What is striking in this photo is the expression on the girls’ faces. After fleeing merciless bloodshed that killed thousands in Somalia, they are now confronted with the photographer whose deathly white skin might belong to an alien from outer space. What Next?
This photograph was also taken in Garissa, Kenya, not far from Dadaab. The desert heat is intolerable, but it is the absence of water that is the most difficult to deal with. Huge tanker trucks take water into the desert to feed a population forced by war to exist in limbo. War is only a symptom of a much deeper threat affecting the Horn of Africa. That problem is climate change which has reduced the water that these nomadic herdsmen depend on to nourish their cattle. In this African society, a man’s status is determined by the number of cattle he owns. When drought kills his cattle, his value as a man also dies. As resources shrink, wars are fought over what remains. The ultimate result is limbo, stranded in a desert with no future.
In this photo, the man on the left is apprehensive, the men beside him express the true emotions of the moment, incomprehension, and fear. Other photographs have dealt with moments of the past. This photograph is a warning about the future.
