Maybe the best two hours of my photographic life

So often when photographing out in the world, I pray to the photo gods.

It’s important because many things have to fall into place for a decent photo. Sometimes you just pray for something, anything, to work with. You pray for good light. You pray for moments and serendipity. You try to not screw up if those things do find you.

Sure, you can manufacture something. But there are ethics in photojournalism and documentary work, one of the primary directives is no fake/directed action. I never did that. Either it happened or it didn’t, and either you got it or you didn’t. If it’s fake, it’s nothing, a bit of theater. The power is that it’s real, authentic. Even as my work has moved to somewhere between art and documentary, I adhere to this. You become a kind of scavenger, a human divining-rod.

It’s getting harder in the modern world as life gets more conformist, regulated and suffocated, especially now that people live in front of screens. Years ago when I started as a photojournalist for newspapers, I would sometimes get sent out by an editor to find a ‘stand-alone’, meaning an everyday-life photo without an article. Just go find a good photo to fill space on the page.

Even before screens took over, I would drive and drive around the suburbs for hours (with my stack of map books, this was before GPS), frantically searching for anything that looked like a photo op. Something going on, something unusual, some sign of life. All I needed was one good shot.

You try making a picture in strip-mall suburbia.

Then there is Kibera.

I’ve written on Medium before about the vast Kibera slum, the largest in Nairobi and in all of Africa:

Why Africa’s Largest Slum is the Best Place in Nairobi

Ok, that’s a title meant to provoke. But in a city of contradictions Kibera is a Russian nesting doll of contradictions within contradictions. A complex place, defying easy stereotypes.

It has a notorious reputation — even Kenyans are a bit afraid of it — but it has achieved basic services like water and electricity in recent years. Because of its notoriety it tends to get more outside aid projects than other slums in the city, but certain episodes have also bred distrust of outside aid. There are byzantine layers to who controls what areas, but also a fierce sense of community often lacking in the rest of Nairobi.

There is an arts district.

I haven’t been to other slums — there are many in Nairobi — but I am told they are often more tense and get far less aid.

In some parts of Nairobi, you can see the dense medieval cluster of Kibera’s corrugated roofs as you whiz by on a nice roadway, as I did in my Uber ride from the airport when I first arrived here in 2023. I was immediately fascinated and knew I would need to somehow explore it. Which I eventually did, with the help of local friends. It was the privilege of a lifetime to gain access to such an intriguing place, where people are trying to live with stoicism and dignity despite the conditions.

Unlike suburbia, in Kibera everything is interesting, irregular, unregulated, improvised, alive. In its own way it has more vitality and intrigue than most of the world’s great cities. There are phones, but no one is sitting at home on Facebook. Life is outside.

Kibera is difficult to penetrate — you wouldn’t last long walking around, esp as a mzungu (white guy) with a camera, nooo sir — but with the right guide everything is possible. People barely look at you, they know you’re vouched for. My guide was a young painter that everyone seemed to know and like.

My first foray into the massive slum had been overwhelming, overstimulating, there was literally too much that seemed worthy of a photo. The next couple times I settled in somewhat, and had a few chances to get inside the life a bit more.

Then I had the kind of day photographers dream about.

My last visit, this past November 7th, wasn’t special at first.

It was raining hard in Kibera. Our guide had something come up and was a couple hours late, so my friend and I had lunch. It seemed like we might not even walk around at all.

Then we did, and hoo-boy. It may have been the most productive 1–2 hours of my photographic life. I have plenty of other work from Kibera, but all of the photos posted here are from the one walkabout that day. They are all basically street photography, quick-reaction observations. Sometimes I would pause a bit to let things come together, sometimes I barely had to break stride.

I’ve always thought good photography is more like channeling or receiving photos rather than either taking or making them. Usually that channeling happens rarely, when I’m in sync with the flow of things properly. This was like that, but over and over.

In the old days driving around on assignment, I’d be happy to get one good one that I didn’t mind putting my name on. If you got three or four worthy shots in an afternoon it was a rousing success. About the same for my personal work.

In one short outing in Kibera I got almost twenty images that I think hit the spot in some way.

Of course, I won’t end up using all of them. But twenty that I would consider for exhibition. Which I may be a part of soon, at a small gallery in Kibera I’m helping to launch for Kibera photographers I work with.

The photo gods were indeed smiling. Maybe it was their karmic gift for all that time I used to spend searching in frustration.

My father went to art school at Pratt in NYC in the 1950s. I remember he criticized the ‘trash can school’ of art, meaning going out and finding the most rundown person or place you can, taking a photo (or making a drawing or whatever), and calling it art. Exploiting people for their picturesque poverty.

This is especially a problem in Africa, which is maybe the most chronically stereotyped part of the world.

As a general practice, I never set out to make a place look bad or good. Certainly I try to never punch down from a position of privilege. I also try not to fall into sugar-coated clichés of the ‘happy poor’. Getting that balance is the crucial test when photographing places like Kibera. I can only photograph what I like. I look for what is interesting and feels both true and fair to people and places, and I understand that stories are complicated.

If you’re doing it right, photography challenges you to up your equanimity game. Not how to fake it but how to have it. As a well-known photographer once told me, people can see through you. They can see through you THROUGH WALLS.

I want to show that Kibera is interesting and worth caring about in a positive way. I love it and hope that comes through.

As I wrote previously after my first short visit: “what I really wanted to show was the unique landscape and the relationship of people to it”. Which is pretty much what I always try to do.

Kibera is not the bogeyman of dysfunction it is often portrayed as. It’s a fascinating urban organism — and a community. A community full of all kinds of complex problems and life is hard. Still, as I saw over and over, if people stick together with some toughness and care for each other, they can get through anything.

Which is dangerously close to a happy-poor stereotype. Sorry.

It’s the best I’ve got to strike a blow against all the unfolding disasters in the world. I refuse to add to the negativity. Something about a butterfly’s wings.