Posts tagged with photography
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![The Creators of Chicago: Artist Luke Pelletier
Graphic designer Lucy Hewett was 27 when she quit her job at a marketing agency and taught herself to take photos, experimenting on friends to hone her portraiture skills. Going freelance was a struggle (stylized portraits don’t pay quite like ad campaigns for McDonald’s) but Hewett credits her success, in part, to the support of her local creative network. This would have been the first in a series of ten profiles, but life had other plans. Enjoy this first and last installment anyway, and thanks for reading with us.
[[MORE]]
Luke Pelletier
Luke Pelletier describes himself as a “painter, printmaker, musician and skateboarder.” He’s a sophomore at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but spend several minutes on his blog and you can tell he was making art long before he entered school.
Pelletier’s West Coast vernacular and bright, sometimes tropical, imagery might lead you to think he migrated from SoCal to Chicago, but he’s originally from Brevard, N.C., where he grew up skateboarding, playing in punk bands and drawing.
At first, it’s astonishing just how much work he has — and how good it is. “Having a lot of different outlets kind of makes you wicked productive,” he says. Sharing something almost every other day on his Tumblr – songs, sketches, paintings and photos, has become a part of his work flow.
You live in Pilsen, on Chicago’s South Side, which is known for its artistic community. Is that why you chose it?
It’s wicked cheap here. And it has two things I like: not paying much for rent and lots of Mexican food.
What inspires you?
Skateboarding was when thinking creatively came into what I did. When you skate, you can look at a handrail and a switch can go off in your head and its not a handrail anymore, it’s something you can skate. That’s how I learned to think about art – taking something that already exists in the world and then making something new. Also, I got into punk when I was really young. Skateboarding and punk both have very distinct aesthetics and bounce off each other really well.
Has art school been a good thing?
School is weird, but it’s getting better. It’s great in some ways because it forces me to think more conceptually.
Do you worry that when you graduate you’ll have to get a “real” job?
The thing is, I don’t want to make trading cards for rich people. What happens when you sell your art to those dudes, especially the really rich people, is they put it in a closet for like 20 years and then when they’re about to die some gallery curates a room full of their stuff, so they can just show off what they own. At the same time I love making paintings and paintings have a certain amount of time and money put into them. There is a price that you have to charge. I think working on commissions kind of fixes that dilemma for me. I can make a T-shirt for a company and a kid can buy a print of my art for twenty bucks.
What kind of projects are you working on now?
Tumblr is actually how I started connecting with people all over the world. I did a split zine collaboration with Ben Jensen, who lives in Canada. After that I just started curating a bunch of different shows with people I met online.
—Photos and text by Lucy Hewett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/796418b3bdab31c7a48702d472fd06ad/tumblr_mkfo1hsxHc1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of Chicago: Artist Luke Pelletier
Graphic designer Lucy Hewett was 27 when she quit her job at a marketing agency and taught herself to take photos, experimenting on friends to hone her portraiture skills. Going freelance was a struggle (stylized portraits don’t pay quite like ad campaigns for McDonald’s) but Hewett credits her success, in part, to the support of her local creative network. This would have been the first in a series of ten profiles, but life had other plans. Enjoy this first and last installment anyway, and thanks for reading with us.
[[MORE]]
Luke Pelletier
Luke Pelletier describes himself as a “painter, printmaker, musician and skateboarder.” He’s a sophomore at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but spend several minutes on his blog and you can tell he was making art long before he entered school.
Pelletier’s West Coast vernacular and bright, sometimes tropical, imagery might lead you to think he migrated from SoCal to Chicago, but he’s originally from Brevard, N.C., where he grew up skateboarding, playing in punk bands and drawing.
At first, it’s astonishing just how much work he has — and how good it is. “Having a lot of different outlets kind of makes you wicked productive,” he says. Sharing something almost every other day on his Tumblr – songs, sketches, paintings and photos, has become a part of his work flow.
You live in Pilsen, on Chicago’s South Side, which is known for its artistic community. Is that why you chose it?
It’s wicked cheap here. And it has two things I like: not paying much for rent and lots of Mexican food.
What inspires you?
Skateboarding was when thinking creatively came into what I did. When you skate, you can look at a handrail and a switch can go off in your head and its not a handrail anymore, it’s something you can skate. That’s how I learned to think about art – taking something that already exists in the world and then making something new. Also, I got into punk when I was really young. Skateboarding and punk both have very distinct aesthetics and bounce off each other really well.
Has art school been a good thing?
School is weird, but it’s getting better. It’s great in some ways because it forces me to think more conceptually.
Do you worry that when you graduate you’ll have to get a “real” job?
The thing is, I don’t want to make trading cards for rich people. What happens when you sell your art to those dudes, especially the really rich people, is they put it in a closet for like 20 years and then when they’re about to die some gallery curates a room full of their stuff, so they can just show off what they own. At the same time I love making paintings and paintings have a certain amount of time and money put into them. There is a price that you have to charge. I think working on commissions kind of fixes that dilemma for me. I can make a T-shirt for a company and a kid can buy a print of my art for twenty bucks.
What kind of projects are you working on now?
Tumblr is actually how I started connecting with people all over the world. I did a split zine collaboration with Ben Jensen, who lives in Canada. After that I just started curating a bunch of different shows with people I met online.
—Photos and text by Lucy Hewett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/88dd8d461bf8079dafe6bedf1fc34c32/tumblr_mkfo1hsxHc1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of Chicago: Artist Luke Pelletier
Graphic designer Lucy Hewett was 27 when she quit her job at a marketing agency and taught herself to take photos, experimenting on friends to hone her portraiture skills. Going freelance was a struggle (stylized portraits don’t pay quite like ad campaigns for McDonald’s) but Hewett credits her success, in part, to the support of her local creative network. This would have been the first in a series of ten profiles, but life had other plans. Enjoy this first and last installment anyway, and thanks for reading with us.
[[MORE]]
Luke Pelletier
Luke Pelletier describes himself as a “painter, printmaker, musician and skateboarder.” He’s a sophomore at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but spend several minutes on his blog and you can tell he was making art long before he entered school.
Pelletier’s West Coast vernacular and bright, sometimes tropical, imagery might lead you to think he migrated from SoCal to Chicago, but he’s originally from Brevard, N.C., where he grew up skateboarding, playing in punk bands and drawing.
At first, it’s astonishing just how much work he has — and how good it is. “Having a lot of different outlets kind of makes you wicked productive,” he says. Sharing something almost every other day on his Tumblr – songs, sketches, paintings and photos, has become a part of his work flow.
You live in Pilsen, on Chicago’s South Side, which is known for its artistic community. Is that why you chose it?
It’s wicked cheap here. And it has two things I like: not paying much for rent and lots of Mexican food.
What inspires you?
Skateboarding was when thinking creatively came into what I did. When you skate, you can look at a handrail and a switch can go off in your head and its not a handrail anymore, it’s something you can skate. That’s how I learned to think about art – taking something that already exists in the world and then making something new. Also, I got into punk when I was really young. Skateboarding and punk both have very distinct aesthetics and bounce off each other really well.
Has art school been a good thing?
School is weird, but it’s getting better. It’s great in some ways because it forces me to think more conceptually.
Do you worry that when you graduate you’ll have to get a “real” job?
The thing is, I don’t want to make trading cards for rich people. What happens when you sell your art to those dudes, especially the really rich people, is they put it in a closet for like 20 years and then when they’re about to die some gallery curates a room full of their stuff, so they can just show off what they own. At the same time I love making paintings and paintings have a certain amount of time and money put into them. There is a price that you have to charge. I think working on commissions kind of fixes that dilemma for me. I can make a T-shirt for a company and a kid can buy a print of my art for twenty bucks.
What kind of projects are you working on now?
Tumblr is actually how I started connecting with people all over the world. I did a split zine collaboration with Ben Jensen, who lives in Canada. After that I just started curating a bunch of different shows with people I met online.
—Photos and text by Lucy Hewett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/244223f3a43f473a5bbf8d90e4aceffd/tumblr_mkfo1hsxHc1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of Chicago: Artist Luke Pelletier
Graphic designer Lucy Hewett was 27 when she quit her job at a marketing agency and taught herself to take photos, experimenting on friends to hone her portraiture skills. Going freelance was a struggle (stylized portraits don’t pay quite like ad campaigns for McDonald’s) but Hewett credits her success, in part, to the support of her local creative network. This would have been the first in a series of ten profiles, but life had other plans. Enjoy this first and last installment anyway, and thanks for reading with us.
[[MORE]]
Luke Pelletier
Luke Pelletier describes himself as a “painter, printmaker, musician and skateboarder.” He’s a sophomore at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but spend several minutes on his blog and you can tell he was making art long before he entered school.
Pelletier’s West Coast vernacular and bright, sometimes tropical, imagery might lead you to think he migrated from SoCal to Chicago, but he’s originally from Brevard, N.C., where he grew up skateboarding, playing in punk bands and drawing.
At first, it’s astonishing just how much work he has — and how good it is. “Having a lot of different outlets kind of makes you wicked productive,” he says. Sharing something almost every other day on his Tumblr – songs, sketches, paintings and photos, has become a part of his work flow.
You live in Pilsen, on Chicago’s South Side, which is known for its artistic community. Is that why you chose it?
It’s wicked cheap here. And it has two things I like: not paying much for rent and lots of Mexican food.
What inspires you?
Skateboarding was when thinking creatively came into what I did. When you skate, you can look at a handrail and a switch can go off in your head and its not a handrail anymore, it’s something you can skate. That’s how I learned to think about art – taking something that already exists in the world and then making something new. Also, I got into punk when I was really young. Skateboarding and punk both have very distinct aesthetics and bounce off each other really well.
Has art school been a good thing?
School is weird, but it’s getting better. It’s great in some ways because it forces me to think more conceptually.
Do you worry that when you graduate you’ll have to get a “real” job?
The thing is, I don’t want to make trading cards for rich people. What happens when you sell your art to those dudes, especially the really rich people, is they put it in a closet for like 20 years and then when they’re about to die some gallery curates a room full of their stuff, so they can just show off what they own. At the same time I love making paintings and paintings have a certain amount of time and money put into them. There is a price that you have to charge. I think working on commissions kind of fixes that dilemma for me. I can make a T-shirt for a company and a kid can buy a print of my art for twenty bucks.
What kind of projects are you working on now?
Tumblr is actually how I started connecting with people all over the world. I did a split zine collaboration with Ben Jensen, who lives in Canada. After that I just started curating a bunch of different shows with people I met online.
—Photos and text by Lucy Hewett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/4e84f4cafc8b6c51bc70b62d94ebe751/tumblr_mkfo1hsxHc1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
![The Creators of Chicago: Artist Luke Pelletier
Graphic designer Lucy Hewett was 27 when she quit her job at a marketing agency and taught herself to take photos, experimenting on friends to hone her portraiture skills. Going freelance was a struggle (stylized portraits don’t pay quite like ad campaigns for McDonald’s) but Hewett credits her success, in part, to the support of her local creative network. This would have been the first in a series of ten profiles, but life had other plans. Enjoy this first and last installment anyway, and thanks for reading with us.
[[MORE]]
Luke Pelletier
Luke Pelletier describes himself as a “painter, printmaker, musician and skateboarder.” He’s a sophomore at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but spend several minutes on his blog and you can tell he was making art long before he entered school.
Pelletier’s West Coast vernacular and bright, sometimes tropical, imagery might lead you to think he migrated from SoCal to Chicago, but he’s originally from Brevard, N.C., where he grew up skateboarding, playing in punk bands and drawing.
At first, it’s astonishing just how much work he has — and how good it is. “Having a lot of different outlets kind of makes you wicked productive,” he says. Sharing something almost every other day on his Tumblr – songs, sketches, paintings and photos, has become a part of his work flow.
You live in Pilsen, on Chicago’s South Side, which is known for its artistic community. Is that why you chose it?
It’s wicked cheap here. And it has two things I like: not paying much for rent and lots of Mexican food.
What inspires you?
Skateboarding was when thinking creatively came into what I did. When you skate, you can look at a handrail and a switch can go off in your head and its not a handrail anymore, it’s something you can skate. That’s how I learned to think about art – taking something that already exists in the world and then making something new. Also, I got into punk when I was really young. Skateboarding and punk both have very distinct aesthetics and bounce off each other really well.
Has art school been a good thing?
School is weird, but it’s getting better. It’s great in some ways because it forces me to think more conceptually.
Do you worry that when you graduate you’ll have to get a “real” job?
The thing is, I don’t want to make trading cards for rich people. What happens when you sell your art to those dudes, especially the really rich people, is they put it in a closet for like 20 years and then when they’re about to die some gallery curates a room full of their stuff, so they can just show off what they own. At the same time I love making paintings and paintings have a certain amount of time and money put into them. There is a price that you have to charge. I think working on commissions kind of fixes that dilemma for me. I can make a T-shirt for a company and a kid can buy a print of my art for twenty bucks.
What kind of projects are you working on now?
Tumblr is actually how I started connecting with people all over the world. I did a split zine collaboration with Ben Jensen, who lives in Canada. After that I just started curating a bunch of different shows with people I met online.
—Photos and text by Lucy Hewett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/9f20bc38b3bfb6c82e683f434f9ae807/tumblr_mkfo1hsxHc1rrpm57o4_1280.jpg)
The Creators of Chicago: Artist Luke Pelletier
Graphic designer Lucy Hewett was 27 when she quit her job at a marketing agency and taught herself to take photos, experimenting on friends to hone her portraiture skills. Going freelance was a struggle (stylized portraits don’t pay quite like ad campaigns for McDonald’s) but Hewett credits her success, in part, to the support of her local creative network. This would have been the first in a series of ten profiles, but life had other plans. Enjoy this first and last installment anyway, and thanks for reading with us.
View post 2,325 notes -
![Everyday Africa: Stories Between the Headlines
In March 2012, two photojournalists — Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill — decided in the middle of a project in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to begin a new, raw media outlet, which portrayed the mundane and casual life of everyday Africans on iPhones and Instagram. A year on, Everyday Africa curates photography from journalists across the continent, and they’re looking to involve locals, too. We spoke to Peter DiCampo to see why he think these images have captured our attention.
What made you decide to start Everyday Africa?
Austin Merrill and I were in Ivory Coast, and we were working on a very specific story on the aftermath of crisis and conflict there. He and I were both Peace Corps volunteers in west Africa, so we spent two years of our lives living in villages. We noticed all of these in-between, daily life, mundane moments, and we realized that, working as journalists, you don’t even shoot these moments. You edit them out ahead of time because they don’t fit into the story you’re trying to tell, which is kind of one of the funny parts about journalism: In some cases, it’s kind of preconceived. In order for a story to make sense, you have to look for certain things.
So we wanted to capture all these other things we were seeing as we went along, which is basically the stream of daily life. Of course “stream” is the key word, because the perfect way to shoot it and the perfect medium to share it is on places like Tumblr, and shooting it on a phone, casually. I think casual and mundane are the key words for this project.
[[MORE]]
Do you think that it’s a failing of the media that news coverage has to focus on these basic narratives we have of Africa?
I don’t know that I’d call it a failing of media because by its very nature media is there to look at the big events, so you’re often seeing the extremes: either the crisis or these stories of rich Africa.
In the US, or the UK, we do often see stories of poverty in western countries. But when I look at a story of poverty in the US, I see this family going through these depressing moments; but because the setting is more familiar, I know it’s not like their entire lives are lived in extreme moments. When the setting, to our eyes, looks as exotic as an African setting looks, you very easily have the assumption—– if you see 10 pictures of Africa, and all of them are of starving people looking sad in a refugee camp — you just have this natural assumption that’s what life is like for people all the time.
I’m not really sure there’s something the traditional media could do to correct this; it’s not their role. But I do think there’s an amazing role for social media to correct it. Aside from Everyday Africa, you have a simple fact that American and European youth can be following African youth on Tumblr, and understanding that their lives are more similar than they realize.
Is that what you’ve seen from your travels?
There are obvious differences. It’s not like we live in a hut. But I mean much more basic than that, in terms of how our time is spent, doing basic everyday things. Every culture in the world has a strong emphasis on family, has a love of a good meal, has a love of certain types of music. We can lose sight of similarities that are that basic if we just look at the news.
And you’re shooting this on your phone; it’s very much rough and ready.
I think there’s something interesting about keeping it on a phone only. For me as a photographer, it’s interesting in the way it has me shoot, which is much more casual. I find that my images are a little less composed, which I like in terms of the audience we’re trying to reach.
The other thing is all the implications of mobile technology in Africa. We’re going to start including a lot of the work of local Africans, as well as trying to look at what regular people are capturing on their phones anyways. It becomes a cliche to talk about this, but it’s amazing to see the influx of cell phones on the continent. Every time I go back, it seems more and more people have phones, and it’s got to the point that when I visit a village in the Ivory Coast, everyone is photographing me on their phones.
What is it that makes the everyday image so powerful?
I have to say, I’m constantly shocked at how much attention we’ve gotten with a project based on normalcy. It’s mindblowing that it’s apparently enough of an interest to get people’s attention. What I think that means is we are not alone in realizing that this is a gap, that this is something we don’t normally see. It’s a fine line … we want to photograph the mundane, but we want the pictures to be interesting. I think the key element is these are moments we’ve seen in our own lives, in the places we live, and just simply don’t see in a place that seems as foreign as Africa does.
There are people, photographers, who have said, “You know, if you want to photograph on your phone, that’s the sort of thing you should use to photograph your girlfriend or your family.” To me, that’s exactly the reason we should be photographing Africa with phones. It’s just a family snap of a foreign place that you don’t usually see.
* * *
In the past few months, Lindsay Mackenzie, a Canadian freelance photojournalist based out of Spain and Tunisia, has joined Everyday Africa’s ranks. She tells us about how societies’ similarities can bring together western and African youth.
How did you get involved?
I got an iPhone last year — my sister gave me her old one — so I started using Instagram and at some point I read about Everyday Africa. I really like their philosophy because having spent a lot of time in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, I get where they’re coming from when they say what they see and experience in Africa and what they see from the other side of the world in coverage is different. We only really see the extremes and the worst cases. People say, “Oh, it must’ve been really terrible being in Tunisia.” Not at all. I lived by the sea. They have fashion shows, and art events, and people go to the beach and the mall. I wanted to show this is a very normal place most of the time.
So this is filling in the gaps TV news and print media miss?
Yeah. There’s only every one story about Equatorial Guinea. Google it. You’ll only read about Teodoro Obiang and the depth of his dictatorship. While that’s valid, it’s nice to show that people go get pedicures at the market, or that there’s really beautiful in the south. You usually see pictures of Africa that have been filtered through editors and through the constraints of print. It’s what people think we should see. With iPhones and Instragram, there’s nobody between you taking the photo and the person on the other side seeing it.
How important is using a phone for the photos?
I think the type of people using Instagram are a much younger generation. When you think of a 15-year old on Instagram, when they see an Instagram-style photo from Equatorial Guinea or Namibia, they’re used to that. It brings it closer to them, being in the photographic language they know how to speak. The whole photo and platform makes people more normal, more human.
— Chris Stokel-Walker](http://24.media.tumblr.com/bac35f8230593155fe05caf85c349e4a/tumblr_mkygysufvy1rrpm57o6_1280.jpg)
![Everyday Africa: Stories Between the Headlines
In March 2012, two photojournalists — Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill — decided in the middle of a project in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to begin a new, raw media outlet, which portrayed the mundane and casual life of everyday Africans on iPhones and Instagram. A year on, Everyday Africa curates photography from journalists across the continent, and they’re looking to involve locals, too. We spoke to Peter DiCampo to see why he think these images have captured our attention.
What made you decide to start Everyday Africa?
Austin Merrill and I were in Ivory Coast, and we were working on a very specific story on the aftermath of crisis and conflict there. He and I were both Peace Corps volunteers in west Africa, so we spent two years of our lives living in villages. We noticed all of these in-between, daily life, mundane moments, and we realized that, working as journalists, you don’t even shoot these moments. You edit them out ahead of time because they don’t fit into the story you’re trying to tell, which is kind of one of the funny parts about journalism: In some cases, it’s kind of preconceived. In order for a story to make sense, you have to look for certain things.
So we wanted to capture all these other things we were seeing as we went along, which is basically the stream of daily life. Of course “stream” is the key word, because the perfect way to shoot it and the perfect medium to share it is on places like Tumblr, and shooting it on a phone, casually. I think casual and mundane are the key words for this project.
[[MORE]]
Do you think that it’s a failing of the media that news coverage has to focus on these basic narratives we have of Africa?
I don’t know that I’d call it a failing of media because by its very nature media is there to look at the big events, so you’re often seeing the extremes: either the crisis or these stories of rich Africa.
In the US, or the UK, we do often see stories of poverty in western countries. But when I look at a story of poverty in the US, I see this family going through these depressing moments; but because the setting is more familiar, I know it’s not like their entire lives are lived in extreme moments. When the setting, to our eyes, looks as exotic as an African setting looks, you very easily have the assumption—– if you see 10 pictures of Africa, and all of them are of starving people looking sad in a refugee camp — you just have this natural assumption that’s what life is like for people all the time.
I’m not really sure there’s something the traditional media could do to correct this; it’s not their role. But I do think there’s an amazing role for social media to correct it. Aside from Everyday Africa, you have a simple fact that American and European youth can be following African youth on Tumblr, and understanding that their lives are more similar than they realize.
Is that what you’ve seen from your travels?
There are obvious differences. It’s not like we live in a hut. But I mean much more basic than that, in terms of how our time is spent, doing basic everyday things. Every culture in the world has a strong emphasis on family, has a love of a good meal, has a love of certain types of music. We can lose sight of similarities that are that basic if we just look at the news.
And you’re shooting this on your phone; it’s very much rough and ready.
I think there’s something interesting about keeping it on a phone only. For me as a photographer, it’s interesting in the way it has me shoot, which is much more casual. I find that my images are a little less composed, which I like in terms of the audience we’re trying to reach.
The other thing is all the implications of mobile technology in Africa. We’re going to start including a lot of the work of local Africans, as well as trying to look at what regular people are capturing on their phones anyways. It becomes a cliche to talk about this, but it’s amazing to see the influx of cell phones on the continent. Every time I go back, it seems more and more people have phones, and it’s got to the point that when I visit a village in the Ivory Coast, everyone is photographing me on their phones.
What is it that makes the everyday image so powerful?
I have to say, I’m constantly shocked at how much attention we’ve gotten with a project based on normalcy. It’s mindblowing that it’s apparently enough of an interest to get people’s attention. What I think that means is we are not alone in realizing that this is a gap, that this is something we don’t normally see. It’s a fine line … we want to photograph the mundane, but we want the pictures to be interesting. I think the key element is these are moments we’ve seen in our own lives, in the places we live, and just simply don’t see in a place that seems as foreign as Africa does.
There are people, photographers, who have said, “You know, if you want to photograph on your phone, that’s the sort of thing you should use to photograph your girlfriend or your family.” To me, that’s exactly the reason we should be photographing Africa with phones. It’s just a family snap of a foreign place that you don’t usually see.
* * *
In the past few months, Lindsay Mackenzie, a Canadian freelance photojournalist based out of Spain and Tunisia, has joined Everyday Africa’s ranks. She tells us about how societies’ similarities can bring together western and African youth.
How did you get involved?
I got an iPhone last year — my sister gave me her old one — so I started using Instagram and at some point I read about Everyday Africa. I really like their philosophy because having spent a lot of time in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, I get where they’re coming from when they say what they see and experience in Africa and what they see from the other side of the world in coverage is different. We only really see the extremes and the worst cases. People say, “Oh, it must’ve been really terrible being in Tunisia.” Not at all. I lived by the sea. They have fashion shows, and art events, and people go to the beach and the mall. I wanted to show this is a very normal place most of the time.
So this is filling in the gaps TV news and print media miss?
Yeah. There’s only every one story about Equatorial Guinea. Google it. You’ll only read about Teodoro Obiang and the depth of his dictatorship. While that’s valid, it’s nice to show that people go get pedicures at the market, or that there’s really beautiful in the south. You usually see pictures of Africa that have been filtered through editors and through the constraints of print. It’s what people think we should see. With iPhones and Instragram, there’s nobody between you taking the photo and the person on the other side seeing it.
How important is using a phone for the photos?
I think the type of people using Instagram are a much younger generation. When you think of a 15-year old on Instagram, when they see an Instagram-style photo from Equatorial Guinea or Namibia, they’re used to that. It brings it closer to them, being in the photographic language they know how to speak. The whole photo and platform makes people more normal, more human.
— Chris Stokel-Walker](http://24.media.tumblr.com/c3ad5e6c2d57dd4f16fde082cc31f0d5/tumblr_mkygysufvy1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
![Everyday Africa: Stories Between the Headlines
In March 2012, two photojournalists — Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill — decided in the middle of a project in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to begin a new, raw media outlet, which portrayed the mundane and casual life of everyday Africans on iPhones and Instagram. A year on, Everyday Africa curates photography from journalists across the continent, and they’re looking to involve locals, too. We spoke to Peter DiCampo to see why he think these images have captured our attention.
What made you decide to start Everyday Africa?
Austin Merrill and I were in Ivory Coast, and we were working on a very specific story on the aftermath of crisis and conflict there. He and I were both Peace Corps volunteers in west Africa, so we spent two years of our lives living in villages. We noticed all of these in-between, daily life, mundane moments, and we realized that, working as journalists, you don’t even shoot these moments. You edit them out ahead of time because they don’t fit into the story you’re trying to tell, which is kind of one of the funny parts about journalism: In some cases, it’s kind of preconceived. In order for a story to make sense, you have to look for certain things.
So we wanted to capture all these other things we were seeing as we went along, which is basically the stream of daily life. Of course “stream” is the key word, because the perfect way to shoot it and the perfect medium to share it is on places like Tumblr, and shooting it on a phone, casually. I think casual and mundane are the key words for this project.
[[MORE]]
Do you think that it’s a failing of the media that news coverage has to focus on these basic narratives we have of Africa?
I don’t know that I’d call it a failing of media because by its very nature media is there to look at the big events, so you’re often seeing the extremes: either the crisis or these stories of rich Africa.
In the US, or the UK, we do often see stories of poverty in western countries. But when I look at a story of poverty in the US, I see this family going through these depressing moments; but because the setting is more familiar, I know it’s not like their entire lives are lived in extreme moments. When the setting, to our eyes, looks as exotic as an African setting looks, you very easily have the assumption—– if you see 10 pictures of Africa, and all of them are of starving people looking sad in a refugee camp — you just have this natural assumption that’s what life is like for people all the time.
I’m not really sure there’s something the traditional media could do to correct this; it’s not their role. But I do think there’s an amazing role for social media to correct it. Aside from Everyday Africa, you have a simple fact that American and European youth can be following African youth on Tumblr, and understanding that their lives are more similar than they realize.
Is that what you’ve seen from your travels?
There are obvious differences. It’s not like we live in a hut. But I mean much more basic than that, in terms of how our time is spent, doing basic everyday things. Every culture in the world has a strong emphasis on family, has a love of a good meal, has a love of certain types of music. We can lose sight of similarities that are that basic if we just look at the news.
And you’re shooting this on your phone; it’s very much rough and ready.
I think there’s something interesting about keeping it on a phone only. For me as a photographer, it’s interesting in the way it has me shoot, which is much more casual. I find that my images are a little less composed, which I like in terms of the audience we’re trying to reach.
The other thing is all the implications of mobile technology in Africa. We’re going to start including a lot of the work of local Africans, as well as trying to look at what regular people are capturing on their phones anyways. It becomes a cliche to talk about this, but it’s amazing to see the influx of cell phones on the continent. Every time I go back, it seems more and more people have phones, and it’s got to the point that when I visit a village in the Ivory Coast, everyone is photographing me on their phones.
What is it that makes the everyday image so powerful?
I have to say, I’m constantly shocked at how much attention we’ve gotten with a project based on normalcy. It’s mindblowing that it’s apparently enough of an interest to get people’s attention. What I think that means is we are not alone in realizing that this is a gap, that this is something we don’t normally see. It’s a fine line … we want to photograph the mundane, but we want the pictures to be interesting. I think the key element is these are moments we’ve seen in our own lives, in the places we live, and just simply don’t see in a place that seems as foreign as Africa does.
There are people, photographers, who have said, “You know, if you want to photograph on your phone, that’s the sort of thing you should use to photograph your girlfriend or your family.” To me, that’s exactly the reason we should be photographing Africa with phones. It’s just a family snap of a foreign place that you don’t usually see.
* * *
In the past few months, Lindsay Mackenzie, a Canadian freelance photojournalist based out of Spain and Tunisia, has joined Everyday Africa’s ranks. She tells us about how societies’ similarities can bring together western and African youth.
How did you get involved?
I got an iPhone last year — my sister gave me her old one — so I started using Instagram and at some point I read about Everyday Africa. I really like their philosophy because having spent a lot of time in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, I get where they’re coming from when they say what they see and experience in Africa and what they see from the other side of the world in coverage is different. We only really see the extremes and the worst cases. People say, “Oh, it must’ve been really terrible being in Tunisia.” Not at all. I lived by the sea. They have fashion shows, and art events, and people go to the beach and the mall. I wanted to show this is a very normal place most of the time.
So this is filling in the gaps TV news and print media miss?
Yeah. There’s only every one story about Equatorial Guinea. Google it. You’ll only read about Teodoro Obiang and the depth of his dictatorship. While that’s valid, it’s nice to show that people go get pedicures at the market, or that there’s really beautiful in the south. You usually see pictures of Africa that have been filtered through editors and through the constraints of print. It’s what people think we should see. With iPhones and Instragram, there’s nobody between you taking the photo and the person on the other side seeing it.
How important is using a phone for the photos?
I think the type of people using Instagram are a much younger generation. When you think of a 15-year old on Instagram, when they see an Instagram-style photo from Equatorial Guinea or Namibia, they’re used to that. It brings it closer to them, being in the photographic language they know how to speak. The whole photo and platform makes people more normal, more human.
— Chris Stokel-Walker](http://24.media.tumblr.com/a60734b6f194b871e38df60e41d55b6a/tumblr_mkygysufvy1rrpm57o7_1280.jpg)
![Everyday Africa: Stories Between the Headlines
In March 2012, two photojournalists — Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill — decided in the middle of a project in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to begin a new, raw media outlet, which portrayed the mundane and casual life of everyday Africans on iPhones and Instagram. A year on, Everyday Africa curates photography from journalists across the continent, and they’re looking to involve locals, too. We spoke to Peter DiCampo to see why he think these images have captured our attention.
What made you decide to start Everyday Africa?
Austin Merrill and I were in Ivory Coast, and we were working on a very specific story on the aftermath of crisis and conflict there. He and I were both Peace Corps volunteers in west Africa, so we spent two years of our lives living in villages. We noticed all of these in-between, daily life, mundane moments, and we realized that, working as journalists, you don’t even shoot these moments. You edit them out ahead of time because they don’t fit into the story you’re trying to tell, which is kind of one of the funny parts about journalism: In some cases, it’s kind of preconceived. In order for a story to make sense, you have to look for certain things.
So we wanted to capture all these other things we were seeing as we went along, which is basically the stream of daily life. Of course “stream” is the key word, because the perfect way to shoot it and the perfect medium to share it is on places like Tumblr, and shooting it on a phone, casually. I think casual and mundane are the key words for this project.
[[MORE]]
Do you think that it’s a failing of the media that news coverage has to focus on these basic narratives we have of Africa?
I don’t know that I’d call it a failing of media because by its very nature media is there to look at the big events, so you’re often seeing the extremes: either the crisis or these stories of rich Africa.
In the US, or the UK, we do often see stories of poverty in western countries. But when I look at a story of poverty in the US, I see this family going through these depressing moments; but because the setting is more familiar, I know it’s not like their entire lives are lived in extreme moments. When the setting, to our eyes, looks as exotic as an African setting looks, you very easily have the assumption—– if you see 10 pictures of Africa, and all of them are of starving people looking sad in a refugee camp — you just have this natural assumption that’s what life is like for people all the time.
I’m not really sure there’s something the traditional media could do to correct this; it’s not their role. But I do think there’s an amazing role for social media to correct it. Aside from Everyday Africa, you have a simple fact that American and European youth can be following African youth on Tumblr, and understanding that their lives are more similar than they realize.
Is that what you’ve seen from your travels?
There are obvious differences. It’s not like we live in a hut. But I mean much more basic than that, in terms of how our time is spent, doing basic everyday things. Every culture in the world has a strong emphasis on family, has a love of a good meal, has a love of certain types of music. We can lose sight of similarities that are that basic if we just look at the news.
And you’re shooting this on your phone; it’s very much rough and ready.
I think there’s something interesting about keeping it on a phone only. For me as a photographer, it’s interesting in the way it has me shoot, which is much more casual. I find that my images are a little less composed, which I like in terms of the audience we’re trying to reach.
The other thing is all the implications of mobile technology in Africa. We’re going to start including a lot of the work of local Africans, as well as trying to look at what regular people are capturing on their phones anyways. It becomes a cliche to talk about this, but it’s amazing to see the influx of cell phones on the continent. Every time I go back, it seems more and more people have phones, and it’s got to the point that when I visit a village in the Ivory Coast, everyone is photographing me on their phones.
What is it that makes the everyday image so powerful?
I have to say, I’m constantly shocked at how much attention we’ve gotten with a project based on normalcy. It’s mindblowing that it’s apparently enough of an interest to get people’s attention. What I think that means is we are not alone in realizing that this is a gap, that this is something we don’t normally see. It’s a fine line … we want to photograph the mundane, but we want the pictures to be interesting. I think the key element is these are moments we’ve seen in our own lives, in the places we live, and just simply don’t see in a place that seems as foreign as Africa does.
There are people, photographers, who have said, “You know, if you want to photograph on your phone, that’s the sort of thing you should use to photograph your girlfriend or your family.” To me, that’s exactly the reason we should be photographing Africa with phones. It’s just a family snap of a foreign place that you don’t usually see.
* * *
In the past few months, Lindsay Mackenzie, a Canadian freelance photojournalist based out of Spain and Tunisia, has joined Everyday Africa’s ranks. She tells us about how societies’ similarities can bring together western and African youth.
How did you get involved?
I got an iPhone last year — my sister gave me her old one — so I started using Instagram and at some point I read about Everyday Africa. I really like their philosophy because having spent a lot of time in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, I get where they’re coming from when they say what they see and experience in Africa and what they see from the other side of the world in coverage is different. We only really see the extremes and the worst cases. People say, “Oh, it must’ve been really terrible being in Tunisia.” Not at all. I lived by the sea. They have fashion shows, and art events, and people go to the beach and the mall. I wanted to show this is a very normal place most of the time.
So this is filling in the gaps TV news and print media miss?
Yeah. There’s only every one story about Equatorial Guinea. Google it. You’ll only read about Teodoro Obiang and the depth of his dictatorship. While that’s valid, it’s nice to show that people go get pedicures at the market, or that there’s really beautiful in the south. You usually see pictures of Africa that have been filtered through editors and through the constraints of print. It’s what people think we should see. With iPhones and Instragram, there’s nobody between you taking the photo and the person on the other side seeing it.
How important is using a phone for the photos?
I think the type of people using Instagram are a much younger generation. When you think of a 15-year old on Instagram, when they see an Instagram-style photo from Equatorial Guinea or Namibia, they’re used to that. It brings it closer to them, being in the photographic language they know how to speak. The whole photo and platform makes people more normal, more human.
— Chris Stokel-Walker](http://24.media.tumblr.com/6115b5dbed7e81614ed2bc3e577c4816/tumblr_mkygysufvy1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
![Everyday Africa: Stories Between the Headlines
In March 2012, two photojournalists — Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill — decided in the middle of a project in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to begin a new, raw media outlet, which portrayed the mundane and casual life of everyday Africans on iPhones and Instagram. A year on, Everyday Africa curates photography from journalists across the continent, and they’re looking to involve locals, too. We spoke to Peter DiCampo to see why he think these images have captured our attention.
What made you decide to start Everyday Africa?
Austin Merrill and I were in Ivory Coast, and we were working on a very specific story on the aftermath of crisis and conflict there. He and I were both Peace Corps volunteers in west Africa, so we spent two years of our lives living in villages. We noticed all of these in-between, daily life, mundane moments, and we realized that, working as journalists, you don’t even shoot these moments. You edit them out ahead of time because they don’t fit into the story you’re trying to tell, which is kind of one of the funny parts about journalism: In some cases, it’s kind of preconceived. In order for a story to make sense, you have to look for certain things.
So we wanted to capture all these other things we were seeing as we went along, which is basically the stream of daily life. Of course “stream” is the key word, because the perfect way to shoot it and the perfect medium to share it is on places like Tumblr, and shooting it on a phone, casually. I think casual and mundane are the key words for this project.
[[MORE]]
Do you think that it’s a failing of the media that news coverage has to focus on these basic narratives we have of Africa?
I don’t know that I’d call it a failing of media because by its very nature media is there to look at the big events, so you’re often seeing the extremes: either the crisis or these stories of rich Africa.
In the US, or the UK, we do often see stories of poverty in western countries. But when I look at a story of poverty in the US, I see this family going through these depressing moments; but because the setting is more familiar, I know it’s not like their entire lives are lived in extreme moments. When the setting, to our eyes, looks as exotic as an African setting looks, you very easily have the assumption—– if you see 10 pictures of Africa, and all of them are of starving people looking sad in a refugee camp — you just have this natural assumption that’s what life is like for people all the time.
I’m not really sure there’s something the traditional media could do to correct this; it’s not their role. But I do think there’s an amazing role for social media to correct it. Aside from Everyday Africa, you have a simple fact that American and European youth can be following African youth on Tumblr, and understanding that their lives are more similar than they realize.
Is that what you’ve seen from your travels?
There are obvious differences. It’s not like we live in a hut. But I mean much more basic than that, in terms of how our time is spent, doing basic everyday things. Every culture in the world has a strong emphasis on family, has a love of a good meal, has a love of certain types of music. We can lose sight of similarities that are that basic if we just look at the news.
And you’re shooting this on your phone; it’s very much rough and ready.
I think there’s something interesting about keeping it on a phone only. For me as a photographer, it’s interesting in the way it has me shoot, which is much more casual. I find that my images are a little less composed, which I like in terms of the audience we’re trying to reach.
The other thing is all the implications of mobile technology in Africa. We’re going to start including a lot of the work of local Africans, as well as trying to look at what regular people are capturing on their phones anyways. It becomes a cliche to talk about this, but it’s amazing to see the influx of cell phones on the continent. Every time I go back, it seems more and more people have phones, and it’s got to the point that when I visit a village in the Ivory Coast, everyone is photographing me on their phones.
What is it that makes the everyday image so powerful?
I have to say, I’m constantly shocked at how much attention we’ve gotten with a project based on normalcy. It’s mindblowing that it’s apparently enough of an interest to get people’s attention. What I think that means is we are not alone in realizing that this is a gap, that this is something we don’t normally see. It’s a fine line … we want to photograph the mundane, but we want the pictures to be interesting. I think the key element is these are moments we’ve seen in our own lives, in the places we live, and just simply don’t see in a place that seems as foreign as Africa does.
There are people, photographers, who have said, “You know, if you want to photograph on your phone, that’s the sort of thing you should use to photograph your girlfriend or your family.” To me, that’s exactly the reason we should be photographing Africa with phones. It’s just a family snap of a foreign place that you don’t usually see.
* * *
In the past few months, Lindsay Mackenzie, a Canadian freelance photojournalist based out of Spain and Tunisia, has joined Everyday Africa’s ranks. She tells us about how societies’ similarities can bring together western and African youth.
How did you get involved?
I got an iPhone last year — my sister gave me her old one — so I started using Instagram and at some point I read about Everyday Africa. I really like their philosophy because having spent a lot of time in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, I get where they’re coming from when they say what they see and experience in Africa and what they see from the other side of the world in coverage is different. We only really see the extremes and the worst cases. People say, “Oh, it must’ve been really terrible being in Tunisia.” Not at all. I lived by the sea. They have fashion shows, and art events, and people go to the beach and the mall. I wanted to show this is a very normal place most of the time.
So this is filling in the gaps TV news and print media miss?
Yeah. There’s only every one story about Equatorial Guinea. Google it. You’ll only read about Teodoro Obiang and the depth of his dictatorship. While that’s valid, it’s nice to show that people go get pedicures at the market, or that there’s really beautiful in the south. You usually see pictures of Africa that have been filtered through editors and through the constraints of print. It’s what people think we should see. With iPhones and Instragram, there’s nobody between you taking the photo and the person on the other side seeing it.
How important is using a phone for the photos?
I think the type of people using Instagram are a much younger generation. When you think of a 15-year old on Instagram, when they see an Instagram-style photo from Equatorial Guinea or Namibia, they’re used to that. It brings it closer to them, being in the photographic language they know how to speak. The whole photo and platform makes people more normal, more human.
— Chris Stokel-Walker](http://24.media.tumblr.com/2408c29c4df75614f757ddcf5227ee51/tumblr_mkygysufvy1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![Everyday Africa: Stories Between the Headlines
In March 2012, two photojournalists — Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill — decided in the middle of a project in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to begin a new, raw media outlet, which portrayed the mundane and casual life of everyday Africans on iPhones and Instagram. A year on, Everyday Africa curates photography from journalists across the continent, and they’re looking to involve locals, too. We spoke to Peter DiCampo to see why he think these images have captured our attention.
What made you decide to start Everyday Africa?
Austin Merrill and I were in Ivory Coast, and we were working on a very specific story on the aftermath of crisis and conflict there. He and I were both Peace Corps volunteers in west Africa, so we spent two years of our lives living in villages. We noticed all of these in-between, daily life, mundane moments, and we realized that, working as journalists, you don’t even shoot these moments. You edit them out ahead of time because they don’t fit into the story you’re trying to tell, which is kind of one of the funny parts about journalism: In some cases, it’s kind of preconceived. In order for a story to make sense, you have to look for certain things.
So we wanted to capture all these other things we were seeing as we went along, which is basically the stream of daily life. Of course “stream” is the key word, because the perfect way to shoot it and the perfect medium to share it is on places like Tumblr, and shooting it on a phone, casually. I think casual and mundane are the key words for this project.
[[MORE]]
Do you think that it’s a failing of the media that news coverage has to focus on these basic narratives we have of Africa?
I don’t know that I’d call it a failing of media because by its very nature media is there to look at the big events, so you’re often seeing the extremes: either the crisis or these stories of rich Africa.
In the US, or the UK, we do often see stories of poverty in western countries. But when I look at a story of poverty in the US, I see this family going through these depressing moments; but because the setting is more familiar, I know it’s not like their entire lives are lived in extreme moments. When the setting, to our eyes, looks as exotic as an African setting looks, you very easily have the assumption—– if you see 10 pictures of Africa, and all of them are of starving people looking sad in a refugee camp — you just have this natural assumption that’s what life is like for people all the time.
I’m not really sure there’s something the traditional media could do to correct this; it’s not their role. But I do think there’s an amazing role for social media to correct it. Aside from Everyday Africa, you have a simple fact that American and European youth can be following African youth on Tumblr, and understanding that their lives are more similar than they realize.
Is that what you’ve seen from your travels?
There are obvious differences. It’s not like we live in a hut. But I mean much more basic than that, in terms of how our time is spent, doing basic everyday things. Every culture in the world has a strong emphasis on family, has a love of a good meal, has a love of certain types of music. We can lose sight of similarities that are that basic if we just look at the news.
And you’re shooting this on your phone; it’s very much rough and ready.
I think there’s something interesting about keeping it on a phone only. For me as a photographer, it’s interesting in the way it has me shoot, which is much more casual. I find that my images are a little less composed, which I like in terms of the audience we’re trying to reach.
The other thing is all the implications of mobile technology in Africa. We’re going to start including a lot of the work of local Africans, as well as trying to look at what regular people are capturing on their phones anyways. It becomes a cliche to talk about this, but it’s amazing to see the influx of cell phones on the continent. Every time I go back, it seems more and more people have phones, and it’s got to the point that when I visit a village in the Ivory Coast, everyone is photographing me on their phones.
What is it that makes the everyday image so powerful?
I have to say, I’m constantly shocked at how much attention we’ve gotten with a project based on normalcy. It’s mindblowing that it’s apparently enough of an interest to get people’s attention. What I think that means is we are not alone in realizing that this is a gap, that this is something we don’t normally see. It’s a fine line … we want to photograph the mundane, but we want the pictures to be interesting. I think the key element is these are moments we’ve seen in our own lives, in the places we live, and just simply don’t see in a place that seems as foreign as Africa does.
There are people, photographers, who have said, “You know, if you want to photograph on your phone, that’s the sort of thing you should use to photograph your girlfriend or your family.” To me, that’s exactly the reason we should be photographing Africa with phones. It’s just a family snap of a foreign place that you don’t usually see.
* * *
In the past few months, Lindsay Mackenzie, a Canadian freelance photojournalist based out of Spain and Tunisia, has joined Everyday Africa’s ranks. She tells us about how societies’ similarities can bring together western and African youth.
How did you get involved?
I got an iPhone last year — my sister gave me her old one — so I started using Instagram and at some point I read about Everyday Africa. I really like their philosophy because having spent a lot of time in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, I get where they’re coming from when they say what they see and experience in Africa and what they see from the other side of the world in coverage is different. We only really see the extremes and the worst cases. People say, “Oh, it must’ve been really terrible being in Tunisia.” Not at all. I lived by the sea. They have fashion shows, and art events, and people go to the beach and the mall. I wanted to show this is a very normal place most of the time.
So this is filling in the gaps TV news and print media miss?
Yeah. There’s only every one story about Equatorial Guinea. Google it. You’ll only read about Teodoro Obiang and the depth of his dictatorship. While that’s valid, it’s nice to show that people go get pedicures at the market, or that there’s really beautiful in the south. You usually see pictures of Africa that have been filtered through editors and through the constraints of print. It’s what people think we should see. With iPhones and Instragram, there’s nobody between you taking the photo and the person on the other side seeing it.
How important is using a phone for the photos?
I think the type of people using Instagram are a much younger generation. When you think of a 15-year old on Instagram, when they see an Instagram-style photo from Equatorial Guinea or Namibia, they’re used to that. It brings it closer to them, being in the photographic language they know how to speak. The whole photo and platform makes people more normal, more human.
— Chris Stokel-Walker](http://25.media.tumblr.com/e95b026f5e1516e94ec96d3a4cc9e113/tumblr_mkygysufvy1rrpm57o4_1280.jpg)
![Everyday Africa: Stories Between the Headlines
In March 2012, two photojournalists — Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill — decided in the middle of a project in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to begin a new, raw media outlet, which portrayed the mundane and casual life of everyday Africans on iPhones and Instagram. A year on, Everyday Africa curates photography from journalists across the continent, and they’re looking to involve locals, too. We spoke to Peter DiCampo to see why he think these images have captured our attention.
What made you decide to start Everyday Africa?
Austin Merrill and I were in Ivory Coast, and we were working on a very specific story on the aftermath of crisis and conflict there. He and I were both Peace Corps volunteers in west Africa, so we spent two years of our lives living in villages. We noticed all of these in-between, daily life, mundane moments, and we realized that, working as journalists, you don’t even shoot these moments. You edit them out ahead of time because they don’t fit into the story you’re trying to tell, which is kind of one of the funny parts about journalism: In some cases, it’s kind of preconceived. In order for a story to make sense, you have to look for certain things.
So we wanted to capture all these other things we were seeing as we went along, which is basically the stream of daily life. Of course “stream” is the key word, because the perfect way to shoot it and the perfect medium to share it is on places like Tumblr, and shooting it on a phone, casually. I think casual and mundane are the key words for this project.
[[MORE]]
Do you think that it’s a failing of the media that news coverage has to focus on these basic narratives we have of Africa?
I don’t know that I’d call it a failing of media because by its very nature media is there to look at the big events, so you’re often seeing the extremes: either the crisis or these stories of rich Africa.
In the US, or the UK, we do often see stories of poverty in western countries. But when I look at a story of poverty in the US, I see this family going through these depressing moments; but because the setting is more familiar, I know it’s not like their entire lives are lived in extreme moments. When the setting, to our eyes, looks as exotic as an African setting looks, you very easily have the assumption—– if you see 10 pictures of Africa, and all of them are of starving people looking sad in a refugee camp — you just have this natural assumption that’s what life is like for people all the time.
I’m not really sure there’s something the traditional media could do to correct this; it’s not their role. But I do think there’s an amazing role for social media to correct it. Aside from Everyday Africa, you have a simple fact that American and European youth can be following African youth on Tumblr, and understanding that their lives are more similar than they realize.
Is that what you’ve seen from your travels?
There are obvious differences. It’s not like we live in a hut. But I mean much more basic than that, in terms of how our time is spent, doing basic everyday things. Every culture in the world has a strong emphasis on family, has a love of a good meal, has a love of certain types of music. We can lose sight of similarities that are that basic if we just look at the news.
And you’re shooting this on your phone; it’s very much rough and ready.
I think there’s something interesting about keeping it on a phone only. For me as a photographer, it’s interesting in the way it has me shoot, which is much more casual. I find that my images are a little less composed, which I like in terms of the audience we’re trying to reach.
The other thing is all the implications of mobile technology in Africa. We’re going to start including a lot of the work of local Africans, as well as trying to look at what regular people are capturing on their phones anyways. It becomes a cliche to talk about this, but it’s amazing to see the influx of cell phones on the continent. Every time I go back, it seems more and more people have phones, and it’s got to the point that when I visit a village in the Ivory Coast, everyone is photographing me on their phones.
What is it that makes the everyday image so powerful?
I have to say, I’m constantly shocked at how much attention we’ve gotten with a project based on normalcy. It’s mindblowing that it’s apparently enough of an interest to get people’s attention. What I think that means is we are not alone in realizing that this is a gap, that this is something we don’t normally see. It’s a fine line … we want to photograph the mundane, but we want the pictures to be interesting. I think the key element is these are moments we’ve seen in our own lives, in the places we live, and just simply don’t see in a place that seems as foreign as Africa does.
There are people, photographers, who have said, “You know, if you want to photograph on your phone, that’s the sort of thing you should use to photograph your girlfriend or your family.” To me, that’s exactly the reason we should be photographing Africa with phones. It’s just a family snap of a foreign place that you don’t usually see.
* * *
In the past few months, Lindsay Mackenzie, a Canadian freelance photojournalist based out of Spain and Tunisia, has joined Everyday Africa’s ranks. She tells us about how societies’ similarities can bring together western and African youth.
How did you get involved?
I got an iPhone last year — my sister gave me her old one — so I started using Instagram and at some point I read about Everyday Africa. I really like their philosophy because having spent a lot of time in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, I get where they’re coming from when they say what they see and experience in Africa and what they see from the other side of the world in coverage is different. We only really see the extremes and the worst cases. People say, “Oh, it must’ve been really terrible being in Tunisia.” Not at all. I lived by the sea. They have fashion shows, and art events, and people go to the beach and the mall. I wanted to show this is a very normal place most of the time.
So this is filling in the gaps TV news and print media miss?
Yeah. There’s only every one story about Equatorial Guinea. Google it. You’ll only read about Teodoro Obiang and the depth of his dictatorship. While that’s valid, it’s nice to show that people go get pedicures at the market, or that there’s really beautiful in the south. You usually see pictures of Africa that have been filtered through editors and through the constraints of print. It’s what people think we should see. With iPhones and Instragram, there’s nobody between you taking the photo and the person on the other side seeing it.
How important is using a phone for the photos?
I think the type of people using Instagram are a much younger generation. When you think of a 15-year old on Instagram, when they see an Instagram-style photo from Equatorial Guinea or Namibia, they’re used to that. It brings it closer to them, being in the photographic language they know how to speak. The whole photo and platform makes people more normal, more human.
— Chris Stokel-Walker](http://24.media.tumblr.com/414b06951444ff960d2c35e0a1026418/tumblr_mkygysufvy1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
Everyday Africa: Stories Between the Headlines
In March 2012, two photojournalists — Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill — decided in the middle of a project in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to begin a new, raw media outlet, which portrayed the mundane and casual life of everyday Africans on iPhones and Instagram. A year on, Everyday Africa curates photography from journalists across the continent, and they’re looking to involve locals, too. We spoke to Peter DiCampo to see why he think these images have captured our attention.
What made you decide to start Everyday Africa?
Austin Merrill and I were in Ivory Coast, and we were working on a very specific story on the aftermath of crisis and conflict there. He and I were both Peace Corps volunteers in west Africa, so we spent two years of our lives living in villages. We noticed all of these in-between, daily life, mundane moments, and we realized that, working as journalists, you don’t even shoot these moments. You edit them out ahead of time because they don’t fit into the story you’re trying to tell, which is kind of one of the funny parts about journalism: In some cases, it’s kind of preconceived. In order for a story to make sense, you have to look for certain things.
So we wanted to capture all these other things we were seeing as we went along, which is basically the stream of daily life. Of course “stream” is the key word, because the perfect way to shoot it and the perfect medium to share it is on places like Tumblr, and shooting it on a phone, casually. I think casual and mundane are the key words for this project.
View post 1,155 notes -
![At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former. [[MORE]]
But in his Gowanus Canal photography series, William Miller evades both of these conventions. His photographs offer glimpses of floating clouds, glittering fragments, iridescent surfaces, and delicate whorls. Although he comes from a photojournalism background — he collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in Kosovo and has worked for The New York Post for ten years — these mesmerizing, dreamlike images leave reportage behind. Instead, they offer ambiguity and abstraction, capturing the fleeting, strange beauty of the Gowanus as well as the contradictions embodied in that beauty. We spoke to him about the inspiration behind his work.
What drew you to photograph the Gowanus?
I’m a photojournalist by trade. I’ve been doing that for most of my life, but in the last few years I’ve been interested in more abstract work and a different approach toward subjects, like with my “Ruined Polaroids” project. So when I was looking at the Gowanus Canal, how strange and beautiful it was, I didn’t want to approach it from a photojournalist’s perspective. I didn’t want to tell, necessarily, a story. I was interested in how it could be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and I was attracted to those contradictions. And when you look down into the garbage and crap, you can see the sun and the sky and the beauty above.
What is your process for the series?
I go out whenever I can, and hope I get lucky. You’re literally running around, trying to get things from a certain perspective, to fall in the frame the way you want them to, to reflect the sky the way you want them to. But a lot of days, maybe ¾ of the days that I go down there, there’s nothing. The water is not cooperating. If there’s something floating, sometimes it’s too far away. Some days it looks perfectly smooth and there’s nothing going on. It isn’t successful every day, and there’s something rewarding about that.
Has living in New York influenced you as an artist?
The city’s scope gives you access to so much. When I started getting interested in fine art, I could go to MoMA and see the things I was reading about in textbooks up close, which is incredible. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — when I walked past it I was floored, because I’d been reading so much about it and it was just sitting there. You’re looking at it and you can’t believe it. Not just because the painting is amazing, but also that you can just have access to it like that. It’s pretty exciting, even for a New Yorker.
Where do you find inspiration?
Recently I’ve been really interested in painting, especially abstract expressionism: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Rothko, obviously. It’s this idea of, when you’re really close to something, it looks remarkably similar to when you’re really far away from something. Like if you think about pictures of the atom and then pictures of planets revolving around the sun. The only difference between those two things is perspective. When you don’t know what you’re looking at, your mind starts to make up its own narrative. I like that shift, or confusion, in perspective.
— Sue Ding](http://25.media.tumblr.com/6fde05564baa4f11aec455a8c715aee1/tumblr_mk8m78GhVx1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
![At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former. [[MORE]]
But in his Gowanus Canal photography series, William Miller evades both of these conventions. His photographs offer glimpses of floating clouds, glittering fragments, iridescent surfaces, and delicate whorls. Although he comes from a photojournalism background — he collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in Kosovo and has worked for The New York Post for ten years — these mesmerizing, dreamlike images leave reportage behind. Instead, they offer ambiguity and abstraction, capturing the fleeting, strange beauty of the Gowanus as well as the contradictions embodied in that beauty. We spoke to him about the inspiration behind his work.
What drew you to photograph the Gowanus?
I’m a photojournalist by trade. I’ve been doing that for most of my life, but in the last few years I’ve been interested in more abstract work and a different approach toward subjects, like with my “Ruined Polaroids” project. So when I was looking at the Gowanus Canal, how strange and beautiful it was, I didn’t want to approach it from a photojournalist’s perspective. I didn’t want to tell, necessarily, a story. I was interested in how it could be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and I was attracted to those contradictions. And when you look down into the garbage and crap, you can see the sun and the sky and the beauty above.
What is your process for the series?
I go out whenever I can, and hope I get lucky. You’re literally running around, trying to get things from a certain perspective, to fall in the frame the way you want them to, to reflect the sky the way you want them to. But a lot of days, maybe ¾ of the days that I go down there, there’s nothing. The water is not cooperating. If there’s something floating, sometimes it’s too far away. Some days it looks perfectly smooth and there’s nothing going on. It isn’t successful every day, and there’s something rewarding about that.
Has living in New York influenced you as an artist?
The city’s scope gives you access to so much. When I started getting interested in fine art, I could go to MoMA and see the things I was reading about in textbooks up close, which is incredible. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — when I walked past it I was floored, because I’d been reading so much about it and it was just sitting there. You’re looking at it and you can’t believe it. Not just because the painting is amazing, but also that you can just have access to it like that. It’s pretty exciting, even for a New Yorker.
Where do you find inspiration?
Recently I’ve been really interested in painting, especially abstract expressionism: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Rothko, obviously. It’s this idea of, when you’re really close to something, it looks remarkably similar to when you’re really far away from something. Like if you think about pictures of the atom and then pictures of planets revolving around the sun. The only difference between those two things is perspective. When you don’t know what you’re looking at, your mind starts to make up its own narrative. I like that shift, or confusion, in perspective.
— Sue Ding](http://24.media.tumblr.com/46e9d8eacc056e2d4c56622320eecfa8/tumblr_mk8m78GhVx1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
![At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former. [[MORE]]
But in his Gowanus Canal photography series, William Miller evades both of these conventions. His photographs offer glimpses of floating clouds, glittering fragments, iridescent surfaces, and delicate whorls. Although he comes from a photojournalism background — he collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in Kosovo and has worked for The New York Post for ten years — these mesmerizing, dreamlike images leave reportage behind. Instead, they offer ambiguity and abstraction, capturing the fleeting, strange beauty of the Gowanus as well as the contradictions embodied in that beauty. We spoke to him about the inspiration behind his work.
What drew you to photograph the Gowanus?
I’m a photojournalist by trade. I’ve been doing that for most of my life, but in the last few years I’ve been interested in more abstract work and a different approach toward subjects, like with my “Ruined Polaroids” project. So when I was looking at the Gowanus Canal, how strange and beautiful it was, I didn’t want to approach it from a photojournalist’s perspective. I didn’t want to tell, necessarily, a story. I was interested in how it could be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and I was attracted to those contradictions. And when you look down into the garbage and crap, you can see the sun and the sky and the beauty above.
What is your process for the series?
I go out whenever I can, and hope I get lucky. You’re literally running around, trying to get things from a certain perspective, to fall in the frame the way you want them to, to reflect the sky the way you want them to. But a lot of days, maybe ¾ of the days that I go down there, there’s nothing. The water is not cooperating. If there’s something floating, sometimes it’s too far away. Some days it looks perfectly smooth and there’s nothing going on. It isn’t successful every day, and there’s something rewarding about that.
Has living in New York influenced you as an artist?
The city’s scope gives you access to so much. When I started getting interested in fine art, I could go to MoMA and see the things I was reading about in textbooks up close, which is incredible. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — when I walked past it I was floored, because I’d been reading so much about it and it was just sitting there. You’re looking at it and you can’t believe it. Not just because the painting is amazing, but also that you can just have access to it like that. It’s pretty exciting, even for a New Yorker.
Where do you find inspiration?
Recently I’ve been really interested in painting, especially abstract expressionism: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Rothko, obviously. It’s this idea of, when you’re really close to something, it looks remarkably similar to when you’re really far away from something. Like if you think about pictures of the atom and then pictures of planets revolving around the sun. The only difference between those two things is perspective. When you don’t know what you’re looking at, your mind starts to make up its own narrative. I like that shift, or confusion, in perspective.
— Sue Ding](http://25.media.tumblr.com/c9a9f1cfa87f0155f8412c1b2998af1b/tumblr_mk8m78GhVx1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former. [[MORE]]
But in his Gowanus Canal photography series, William Miller evades both of these conventions. His photographs offer glimpses of floating clouds, glittering fragments, iridescent surfaces, and delicate whorls. Although he comes from a photojournalism background — he collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in Kosovo and has worked for The New York Post for ten years — these mesmerizing, dreamlike images leave reportage behind. Instead, they offer ambiguity and abstraction, capturing the fleeting, strange beauty of the Gowanus as well as the contradictions embodied in that beauty. We spoke to him about the inspiration behind his work.
What drew you to photograph the Gowanus?
I’m a photojournalist by trade. I’ve been doing that for most of my life, but in the last few years I’ve been interested in more abstract work and a different approach toward subjects, like with my “Ruined Polaroids” project. So when I was looking at the Gowanus Canal, how strange and beautiful it was, I didn’t want to approach it from a photojournalist’s perspective. I didn’t want to tell, necessarily, a story. I was interested in how it could be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and I was attracted to those contradictions. And when you look down into the garbage and crap, you can see the sun and the sky and the beauty above.
What is your process for the series?
I go out whenever I can, and hope I get lucky. You’re literally running around, trying to get things from a certain perspective, to fall in the frame the way you want them to, to reflect the sky the way you want them to. But a lot of days, maybe ¾ of the days that I go down there, there’s nothing. The water is not cooperating. If there’s something floating, sometimes it’s too far away. Some days it looks perfectly smooth and there’s nothing going on. It isn’t successful every day, and there’s something rewarding about that.
Has living in New York influenced you as an artist?
The city’s scope gives you access to so much. When I started getting interested in fine art, I could go to MoMA and see the things I was reading about in textbooks up close, which is incredible. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — when I walked past it I was floored, because I’d been reading so much about it and it was just sitting there. You’re looking at it and you can’t believe it. Not just because the painting is amazing, but also that you can just have access to it like that. It’s pretty exciting, even for a New Yorker.
Where do you find inspiration?
Recently I’ve been really interested in painting, especially abstract expressionism: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Rothko, obviously. It’s this idea of, when you’re really close to something, it looks remarkably similar to when you’re really far away from something. Like if you think about pictures of the atom and then pictures of planets revolving around the sun. The only difference between those two things is perspective. When you don’t know what you’re looking at, your mind starts to make up its own narrative. I like that shift, or confusion, in perspective.
— Sue Ding](http://25.media.tumblr.com/437c396b6efeada47d2f70a14db52762/tumblr_mk8m78GhVx1rrpm57o4_1280.jpg)
![At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former. [[MORE]]
But in his Gowanus Canal photography series, William Miller evades both of these conventions. His photographs offer glimpses of floating clouds, glittering fragments, iridescent surfaces, and delicate whorls. Although he comes from a photojournalism background — he collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in Kosovo and has worked for The New York Post for ten years — these mesmerizing, dreamlike images leave reportage behind. Instead, they offer ambiguity and abstraction, capturing the fleeting, strange beauty of the Gowanus as well as the contradictions embodied in that beauty. We spoke to him about the inspiration behind his work.
What drew you to photograph the Gowanus?
I’m a photojournalist by trade. I’ve been doing that for most of my life, but in the last few years I’ve been interested in more abstract work and a different approach toward subjects, like with my “Ruined Polaroids” project. So when I was looking at the Gowanus Canal, how strange and beautiful it was, I didn’t want to approach it from a photojournalist’s perspective. I didn’t want to tell, necessarily, a story. I was interested in how it could be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and I was attracted to those contradictions. And when you look down into the garbage and crap, you can see the sun and the sky and the beauty above.
What is your process for the series?
I go out whenever I can, and hope I get lucky. You’re literally running around, trying to get things from a certain perspective, to fall in the frame the way you want them to, to reflect the sky the way you want them to. But a lot of days, maybe ¾ of the days that I go down there, there’s nothing. The water is not cooperating. If there’s something floating, sometimes it’s too far away. Some days it looks perfectly smooth and there’s nothing going on. It isn’t successful every day, and there’s something rewarding about that.
Has living in New York influenced you as an artist?
The city’s scope gives you access to so much. When I started getting interested in fine art, I could go to MoMA and see the things I was reading about in textbooks up close, which is incredible. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — when I walked past it I was floored, because I’d been reading so much about it and it was just sitting there. You’re looking at it and you can’t believe it. Not just because the painting is amazing, but also that you can just have access to it like that. It’s pretty exciting, even for a New Yorker.
Where do you find inspiration?
Recently I’ve been really interested in painting, especially abstract expressionism: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Rothko, obviously. It’s this idea of, when you’re really close to something, it looks remarkably similar to when you’re really far away from something. Like if you think about pictures of the atom and then pictures of planets revolving around the sun. The only difference between those two things is perspective. When you don’t know what you’re looking at, your mind starts to make up its own narrative. I like that shift, or confusion, in perspective.
— Sue Ding](http://24.media.tumblr.com/2fad13951865b833113fa43039353e40/tumblr_mk8m78GhVx1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
![At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former. [[MORE]]
But in his Gowanus Canal photography series, William Miller evades both of these conventions. His photographs offer glimpses of floating clouds, glittering fragments, iridescent surfaces, and delicate whorls. Although he comes from a photojournalism background — he collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in Kosovo and has worked for The New York Post for ten years — these mesmerizing, dreamlike images leave reportage behind. Instead, they offer ambiguity and abstraction, capturing the fleeting, strange beauty of the Gowanus as well as the contradictions embodied in that beauty. We spoke to him about the inspiration behind his work.
What drew you to photograph the Gowanus?
I’m a photojournalist by trade. I’ve been doing that for most of my life, but in the last few years I’ve been interested in more abstract work and a different approach toward subjects, like with my “Ruined Polaroids” project. So when I was looking at the Gowanus Canal, how strange and beautiful it was, I didn’t want to approach it from a photojournalist’s perspective. I didn’t want to tell, necessarily, a story. I was interested in how it could be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and I was attracted to those contradictions. And when you look down into the garbage and crap, you can see the sun and the sky and the beauty above.
What is your process for the series?
I go out whenever I can, and hope I get lucky. You’re literally running around, trying to get things from a certain perspective, to fall in the frame the way you want them to, to reflect the sky the way you want them to. But a lot of days, maybe ¾ of the days that I go down there, there’s nothing. The water is not cooperating. If there’s something floating, sometimes it’s too far away. Some days it looks perfectly smooth and there’s nothing going on. It isn’t successful every day, and there’s something rewarding about that.
Has living in New York influenced you as an artist?
The city’s scope gives you access to so much. When I started getting interested in fine art, I could go to MoMA and see the things I was reading about in textbooks up close, which is incredible. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — when I walked past it I was floored, because I’d been reading so much about it and it was just sitting there. You’re looking at it and you can’t believe it. Not just because the painting is amazing, but also that you can just have access to it like that. It’s pretty exciting, even for a New Yorker.
Where do you find inspiration?
Recently I’ve been really interested in painting, especially abstract expressionism: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Rothko, obviously. It’s this idea of, when you’re really close to something, it looks remarkably similar to when you’re really far away from something. Like if you think about pictures of the atom and then pictures of planets revolving around the sun. The only difference between those two things is perspective. When you don’t know what you’re looking at, your mind starts to make up its own narrative. I like that shift, or confusion, in perspective.
— Sue Ding](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8aa9c9c7a69a80a25cdef57e56f03def/tumblr_mk8m78GhVx1rrpm57o6_1280.jpg)
![At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former. [[MORE]]
But in his Gowanus Canal photography series, William Miller evades both of these conventions. His photographs offer glimpses of floating clouds, glittering fragments, iridescent surfaces, and delicate whorls. Although he comes from a photojournalism background — he collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in Kosovo and has worked for The New York Post for ten years — these mesmerizing, dreamlike images leave reportage behind. Instead, they offer ambiguity and abstraction, capturing the fleeting, strange beauty of the Gowanus as well as the contradictions embodied in that beauty. We spoke to him about the inspiration behind his work.
What drew you to photograph the Gowanus?
I’m a photojournalist by trade. I’ve been doing that for most of my life, but in the last few years I’ve been interested in more abstract work and a different approach toward subjects, like with my “Ruined Polaroids” project. So when I was looking at the Gowanus Canal, how strange and beautiful it was, I didn’t want to approach it from a photojournalist’s perspective. I didn’t want to tell, necessarily, a story. I was interested in how it could be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and I was attracted to those contradictions. And when you look down into the garbage and crap, you can see the sun and the sky and the beauty above.
What is your process for the series?
I go out whenever I can, and hope I get lucky. You’re literally running around, trying to get things from a certain perspective, to fall in the frame the way you want them to, to reflect the sky the way you want them to. But a lot of days, maybe ¾ of the days that I go down there, there’s nothing. The water is not cooperating. If there’s something floating, sometimes it’s too far away. Some days it looks perfectly smooth and there’s nothing going on. It isn’t successful every day, and there’s something rewarding about that.
Has living in New York influenced you as an artist?
The city’s scope gives you access to so much. When I started getting interested in fine art, I could go to MoMA and see the things I was reading about in textbooks up close, which is incredible. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — when I walked past it I was floored, because I’d been reading so much about it and it was just sitting there. You’re looking at it and you can’t believe it. Not just because the painting is amazing, but also that you can just have access to it like that. It’s pretty exciting, even for a New Yorker.
Where do you find inspiration?
Recently I’ve been really interested in painting, especially abstract expressionism: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Rothko, obviously. It’s this idea of, when you’re really close to something, it looks remarkably similar to when you’re really far away from something. Like if you think about pictures of the atom and then pictures of planets revolving around the sun. The only difference between those two things is perspective. When you don’t know what you’re looking at, your mind starts to make up its own narrative. I like that shift, or confusion, in perspective.
— Sue Ding](http://25.media.tumblr.com/e0b567d565e2f613428f74b94c6bdee0/tumblr_mk8m78GhVx1rrpm57o7_1280.jpg)
![At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former. [[MORE]]
But in his Gowanus Canal photography series, William Miller evades both of these conventions. His photographs offer glimpses of floating clouds, glittering fragments, iridescent surfaces, and delicate whorls. Although he comes from a photojournalism background — he collaborated with Doctors Without Borders in Kosovo and has worked for The New York Post for ten years — these mesmerizing, dreamlike images leave reportage behind. Instead, they offer ambiguity and abstraction, capturing the fleeting, strange beauty of the Gowanus as well as the contradictions embodied in that beauty. We spoke to him about the inspiration behind his work.
What drew you to photograph the Gowanus?
I’m a photojournalist by trade. I’ve been doing that for most of my life, but in the last few years I’ve been interested in more abstract work and a different approach toward subjects, like with my “Ruined Polaroids” project. So when I was looking at the Gowanus Canal, how strange and beautiful it was, I didn’t want to approach it from a photojournalist’s perspective. I didn’t want to tell, necessarily, a story. I was interested in how it could be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and I was attracted to those contradictions. And when you look down into the garbage and crap, you can see the sun and the sky and the beauty above.
What is your process for the series?
I go out whenever I can, and hope I get lucky. You’re literally running around, trying to get things from a certain perspective, to fall in the frame the way you want them to, to reflect the sky the way you want them to. But a lot of days, maybe ¾ of the days that I go down there, there’s nothing. The water is not cooperating. If there’s something floating, sometimes it’s too far away. Some days it looks perfectly smooth and there’s nothing going on. It isn’t successful every day, and there’s something rewarding about that.
Has living in New York influenced you as an artist?
The city’s scope gives you access to so much. When I started getting interested in fine art, I could go to MoMA and see the things I was reading about in textbooks up close, which is incredible. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon — when I walked past it I was floored, because I’d been reading so much about it and it was just sitting there. You’re looking at it and you can’t believe it. Not just because the painting is amazing, but also that you can just have access to it like that. It’s pretty exciting, even for a New Yorker.
Where do you find inspiration?
Recently I’ve been really interested in painting, especially abstract expressionism: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Milton Resnick, and Rothko, obviously. It’s this idea of, when you’re really close to something, it looks remarkably similar to when you’re really far away from something. Like if you think about pictures of the atom and then pictures of planets revolving around the sun. The only difference between those two things is perspective. When you don’t know what you’re looking at, your mind starts to make up its own narrative. I like that shift, or confusion, in perspective.
— Sue Ding](http://24.media.tumblr.com/e2007e3fd5a4f9c9529fb234355a13c1/tumblr_mk8m78GhVx1rrpm57o8_1280.jpg)
At Gowanus Canal, Turning Toxic Waste Into Art
New York’s Gowanus Canal is notoriously toxic — full of dangerous chemicals, industrial waste, and yes, poop. It reeks in the summer and lives in the popular imagination as the perfect dumping ground for dead bodies. No plant or animal life can survive in it for long. This tends to inspire two kinds of images: gritty photos of the filth and pollution, and scenic landscapes that try not to dwell too long on the former.
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![Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
[[MORE]]
How did the idea for Sevens Clash come about?
Alexander Richter: Sevens Clash was born from the desire to create new work and to collaborate with talented people while doing it.
Sean Stewart: I’m always setting up interviews as an excuse to talk to people doing interesting shit, and a project like Sevens Clash is a great vehicle to help focus (and justify) that mania.
Anthony Harrison: Alex and I actually connected on Instagram after seeing each others’ work posted. It was a mutual respect thing. He told me about the big idea, and I offered up my services to create a brand identity. I looked at Sean’s blog and was blown away. One phone conversation with these cats told me that Sevens Clash was something I needed to be a part of.
What prompted you to choose Kingston for the first volume of Sevens Clash?
AR: Jamaica has long been a place I wanted to visit. I’m a big fan of reggae and dancehall music, so naturally once I started to make pictures, Jamaica was a place that I wanted to go to and cook up some serious work. After connecting with Sean who is from Kingston, it was a no-brainer to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a project documenting and exploring Kingston.
AH: My parents are both Jamaican and emigrated to England in their teens, where I was born. For me, this was a way to grasp my roots. The older I get, the more connected I feel. So when I spoke with Alex and he said, “Trust me man, this is going to be culturally authentic and not some fluff ‘Wha gwan Jamaica?’ piece, I was in. I didn’t actually travel with Alex and Sean, but I was there in spirit.
How did Sean and Anthony’s familial ties and knowledge of Jamaica help the project?
AH: When I think about the premise behind the project as it applies to the art direction, my roots help me to translate our stories to our audience. Jamaica is viewed in a certain light in England and America, so visual communication means that I can call on various cultural cues to get our stories across to a broad and diverse audience in a meaningful and authentic manner. Growing up in a Jamaican household — and being familiar yet somewhat removed — helps me to see things from an objective point of view. As I get older, I’m finding myself digging deeper and making more solid family connections.
AR: Well, the fact that Sean and Anthony have a direct connection to Jamaica was key to the success of Sevens Clash. Since Sean is from Kingston, he was integral to not only helping us link with the right people in order to pursue the stories that we covered, but because he was able to bring a unique voice to our stories. I think Jamaica is often written about by outsiders who don’t understand the complexity of the country, and having Sean writing for us from the perspective of a native Jamaican was essential because he was able to see the stories for what they were and not trying to create something they weren’t.
As for Anthony, even though he wasn’t with us on the ground in Kingston, he understands the culture, the sport, the music, and the food of Jamaica and is able to bring that knowledge to the visual identity that he was creating with each feature. One look at the artwork for our stories and you can tell that Anthony is dialed in. Look at “The Ballad of Tommy Lee,” “Record Shopping At Rockers International,” “Dancehall Bespoke,” or “Organize Dat!” just to name a few, and you will see there is no faking the funk.
What surprised you the most about your trip through Kingston? You were approached by a pimp on Ripon Road.
AR: Ripon was a pretty funny situation because I was so focused on working with the girls that I didn’t really notice him when he rolled up. Some words were exchanged off to the side, but fortunately nothing happened. I shot a few photos of them standing in the middle of the street, and then we dipped off into the night without incident. As for what surprised me the most, that’s a tough question to answer. Jamaica moves in a different way than the States, and as a result my approach had to be different. That being said, it was an amazing place to visit and work.
Corruption, especially among law enforcement, is often talked about when discussing Jamaica. Did you encounter any trouble with police during your trip?
AR: None whatsoever.
SS: In my experience, the difference between the culture of corruption in the United States and Jamaica is one of degree, not kind. And when you really get down to it, it’s mostly a question of style. That being said, we didn’t really have any issues on this trip.
What’s the origin of the name Sevens Clash?
SS: It’s taken from a reggae song called “Two Sevens Clash” by the vocal trio Culture. The songwriter (and lead singer), Joseph Hill, was inspired by a vision of July 7, 1977, as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s rumored prophecy that the oppressed would rise up “when the two sevens meet.” Whether the lyrics were taken literally or metaphorically, Hill’s predictions found easy resonance in the midst of the chaos surrounding the efforts to destabilize Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Recorded in 1976 and pressed up in early 1977, the song was an immediate hit — both at home and in the UK, where the punk and reggae subcultures were then colliding. And I think Anthony’s logo perfectly captures that energy.
You spent a week in Kingston, but have been publishing the stories over a number of months. Can you talk about the thought process behind the publication schedule for the project?
SS: Where possible, we try to peg each piece to a relevant event. The added bonus of the pacing is that we’ve been able to build an audience organically without losing momentum.
AR: This whole project has been based on feeling. I can imagine Volume 2 will be the same.
When you say you “peg each piece to a relevant event,” can you give examples?
SS: Definitely. We waited until right before Sting to drop the Isaiah Laing piece and published the Protoje piece shortly before the iTunes release of his single “Kingston Be Wise.” We put up our piece on the legendary Jamaican flyweight Richard ‘Shrimpy’ Clarke in anticipation of the 2013 season of The Contender, a hugely popular Jamaican boxing reality TV show.
Do you have a destination and subject matter in mind for Volume 2?
AR: Well, we’ve decided that for Volume 2 we’re going to stay close to home and explore some of the interesting stories that are taking place in our own backyard.
SS: For the next installment we’ll mostly be roaming around New York and New Jersey. We’ll still be digging up stories on music, art, sports, and street life, but this time without the seven-day handicap we had in Jamaica.
— Matthew Newton](http://25.media.tumblr.com/a9de054466ca0b7a9f376d88acacebd3/tumblr_mk84g9fw331rrpm57o4_1280.jpg)
![Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
[[MORE]]
How did the idea for Sevens Clash come about?
Alexander Richter: Sevens Clash was born from the desire to create new work and to collaborate with talented people while doing it.
Sean Stewart: I’m always setting up interviews as an excuse to talk to people doing interesting shit, and a project like Sevens Clash is a great vehicle to help focus (and justify) that mania.
Anthony Harrison: Alex and I actually connected on Instagram after seeing each others’ work posted. It was a mutual respect thing. He told me about the big idea, and I offered up my services to create a brand identity. I looked at Sean’s blog and was blown away. One phone conversation with these cats told me that Sevens Clash was something I needed to be a part of.
What prompted you to choose Kingston for the first volume of Sevens Clash?
AR: Jamaica has long been a place I wanted to visit. I’m a big fan of reggae and dancehall music, so naturally once I started to make pictures, Jamaica was a place that I wanted to go to and cook up some serious work. After connecting with Sean who is from Kingston, it was a no-brainer to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a project documenting and exploring Kingston.
AH: My parents are both Jamaican and emigrated to England in their teens, where I was born. For me, this was a way to grasp my roots. The older I get, the more connected I feel. So when I spoke with Alex and he said, “Trust me man, this is going to be culturally authentic and not some fluff ‘Wha gwan Jamaica?’ piece, I was in. I didn’t actually travel with Alex and Sean, but I was there in spirit.
How did Sean and Anthony’s familial ties and knowledge of Jamaica help the project?
AH: When I think about the premise behind the project as it applies to the art direction, my roots help me to translate our stories to our audience. Jamaica is viewed in a certain light in England and America, so visual communication means that I can call on various cultural cues to get our stories across to a broad and diverse audience in a meaningful and authentic manner. Growing up in a Jamaican household — and being familiar yet somewhat removed — helps me to see things from an objective point of view. As I get older, I’m finding myself digging deeper and making more solid family connections.
AR: Well, the fact that Sean and Anthony have a direct connection to Jamaica was key to the success of Sevens Clash. Since Sean is from Kingston, he was integral to not only helping us link with the right people in order to pursue the stories that we covered, but because he was able to bring a unique voice to our stories. I think Jamaica is often written about by outsiders who don’t understand the complexity of the country, and having Sean writing for us from the perspective of a native Jamaican was essential because he was able to see the stories for what they were and not trying to create something they weren’t.
As for Anthony, even though he wasn’t with us on the ground in Kingston, he understands the culture, the sport, the music, and the food of Jamaica and is able to bring that knowledge to the visual identity that he was creating with each feature. One look at the artwork for our stories and you can tell that Anthony is dialed in. Look at “The Ballad of Tommy Lee,” “Record Shopping At Rockers International,” “Dancehall Bespoke,” or “Organize Dat!” just to name a few, and you will see there is no faking the funk.
What surprised you the most about your trip through Kingston? You were approached by a pimp on Ripon Road.
AR: Ripon was a pretty funny situation because I was so focused on working with the girls that I didn’t really notice him when he rolled up. Some words were exchanged off to the side, but fortunately nothing happened. I shot a few photos of them standing in the middle of the street, and then we dipped off into the night without incident. As for what surprised me the most, that’s a tough question to answer. Jamaica moves in a different way than the States, and as a result my approach had to be different. That being said, it was an amazing place to visit and work.
Corruption, especially among law enforcement, is often talked about when discussing Jamaica. Did you encounter any trouble with police during your trip?
AR: None whatsoever.
SS: In my experience, the difference between the culture of corruption in the United States and Jamaica is one of degree, not kind. And when you really get down to it, it’s mostly a question of style. That being said, we didn’t really have any issues on this trip.
What’s the origin of the name Sevens Clash?
SS: It’s taken from a reggae song called “Two Sevens Clash” by the vocal trio Culture. The songwriter (and lead singer), Joseph Hill, was inspired by a vision of July 7, 1977, as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s rumored prophecy that the oppressed would rise up “when the two sevens meet.” Whether the lyrics were taken literally or metaphorically, Hill’s predictions found easy resonance in the midst of the chaos surrounding the efforts to destabilize Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Recorded in 1976 and pressed up in early 1977, the song was an immediate hit — both at home and in the UK, where the punk and reggae subcultures were then colliding. And I think Anthony’s logo perfectly captures that energy.
You spent a week in Kingston, but have been publishing the stories over a number of months. Can you talk about the thought process behind the publication schedule for the project?
SS: Where possible, we try to peg each piece to a relevant event. The added bonus of the pacing is that we’ve been able to build an audience organically without losing momentum.
AR: This whole project has been based on feeling. I can imagine Volume 2 will be the same.
When you say you “peg each piece to a relevant event,” can you give examples?
SS: Definitely. We waited until right before Sting to drop the Isaiah Laing piece and published the Protoje piece shortly before the iTunes release of his single “Kingston Be Wise.” We put up our piece on the legendary Jamaican flyweight Richard ‘Shrimpy’ Clarke in anticipation of the 2013 season of The Contender, a hugely popular Jamaican boxing reality TV show.
Do you have a destination and subject matter in mind for Volume 2?
AR: Well, we’ve decided that for Volume 2 we’re going to stay close to home and explore some of the interesting stories that are taking place in our own backyard.
SS: For the next installment we’ll mostly be roaming around New York and New Jersey. We’ll still be digging up stories on music, art, sports, and street life, but this time without the seven-day handicap we had in Jamaica.
— Matthew Newton](http://24.media.tumblr.com/eb7e25dcc66198c70968bf01b496309e/tumblr_mk84g9fw331rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
[[MORE]]
How did the idea for Sevens Clash come about?
Alexander Richter: Sevens Clash was born from the desire to create new work and to collaborate with talented people while doing it.
Sean Stewart: I’m always setting up interviews as an excuse to talk to people doing interesting shit, and a project like Sevens Clash is a great vehicle to help focus (and justify) that mania.
Anthony Harrison: Alex and I actually connected on Instagram after seeing each others’ work posted. It was a mutual respect thing. He told me about the big idea, and I offered up my services to create a brand identity. I looked at Sean’s blog and was blown away. One phone conversation with these cats told me that Sevens Clash was something I needed to be a part of.
What prompted you to choose Kingston for the first volume of Sevens Clash?
AR: Jamaica has long been a place I wanted to visit. I’m a big fan of reggae and dancehall music, so naturally once I started to make pictures, Jamaica was a place that I wanted to go to and cook up some serious work. After connecting with Sean who is from Kingston, it was a no-brainer to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a project documenting and exploring Kingston.
AH: My parents are both Jamaican and emigrated to England in their teens, where I was born. For me, this was a way to grasp my roots. The older I get, the more connected I feel. So when I spoke with Alex and he said, “Trust me man, this is going to be culturally authentic and not some fluff ‘Wha gwan Jamaica?’ piece, I was in. I didn’t actually travel with Alex and Sean, but I was there in spirit.
How did Sean and Anthony’s familial ties and knowledge of Jamaica help the project?
AH: When I think about the premise behind the project as it applies to the art direction, my roots help me to translate our stories to our audience. Jamaica is viewed in a certain light in England and America, so visual communication means that I can call on various cultural cues to get our stories across to a broad and diverse audience in a meaningful and authentic manner. Growing up in a Jamaican household — and being familiar yet somewhat removed — helps me to see things from an objective point of view. As I get older, I’m finding myself digging deeper and making more solid family connections.
AR: Well, the fact that Sean and Anthony have a direct connection to Jamaica was key to the success of Sevens Clash. Since Sean is from Kingston, he was integral to not only helping us link with the right people in order to pursue the stories that we covered, but because he was able to bring a unique voice to our stories. I think Jamaica is often written about by outsiders who don’t understand the complexity of the country, and having Sean writing for us from the perspective of a native Jamaican was essential because he was able to see the stories for what they were and not trying to create something they weren’t.
As for Anthony, even though he wasn’t with us on the ground in Kingston, he understands the culture, the sport, the music, and the food of Jamaica and is able to bring that knowledge to the visual identity that he was creating with each feature. One look at the artwork for our stories and you can tell that Anthony is dialed in. Look at “The Ballad of Tommy Lee,” “Record Shopping At Rockers International,” “Dancehall Bespoke,” or “Organize Dat!” just to name a few, and you will see there is no faking the funk.
What surprised you the most about your trip through Kingston? You were approached by a pimp on Ripon Road.
AR: Ripon was a pretty funny situation because I was so focused on working with the girls that I didn’t really notice him when he rolled up. Some words were exchanged off to the side, but fortunately nothing happened. I shot a few photos of them standing in the middle of the street, and then we dipped off into the night without incident. As for what surprised me the most, that’s a tough question to answer. Jamaica moves in a different way than the States, and as a result my approach had to be different. That being said, it was an amazing place to visit and work.
Corruption, especially among law enforcement, is often talked about when discussing Jamaica. Did you encounter any trouble with police during your trip?
AR: None whatsoever.
SS: In my experience, the difference between the culture of corruption in the United States and Jamaica is one of degree, not kind. And when you really get down to it, it’s mostly a question of style. That being said, we didn’t really have any issues on this trip.
What’s the origin of the name Sevens Clash?
SS: It’s taken from a reggae song called “Two Sevens Clash” by the vocal trio Culture. The songwriter (and lead singer), Joseph Hill, was inspired by a vision of July 7, 1977, as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s rumored prophecy that the oppressed would rise up “when the two sevens meet.” Whether the lyrics were taken literally or metaphorically, Hill’s predictions found easy resonance in the midst of the chaos surrounding the efforts to destabilize Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Recorded in 1976 and pressed up in early 1977, the song was an immediate hit — both at home and in the UK, where the punk and reggae subcultures were then colliding. And I think Anthony’s logo perfectly captures that energy.
You spent a week in Kingston, but have been publishing the stories over a number of months. Can you talk about the thought process behind the publication schedule for the project?
SS: Where possible, we try to peg each piece to a relevant event. The added bonus of the pacing is that we’ve been able to build an audience organically without losing momentum.
AR: This whole project has been based on feeling. I can imagine Volume 2 will be the same.
When you say you “peg each piece to a relevant event,” can you give examples?
SS: Definitely. We waited until right before Sting to drop the Isaiah Laing piece and published the Protoje piece shortly before the iTunes release of his single “Kingston Be Wise.” We put up our piece on the legendary Jamaican flyweight Richard ‘Shrimpy’ Clarke in anticipation of the 2013 season of The Contender, a hugely popular Jamaican boxing reality TV show.
Do you have a destination and subject matter in mind for Volume 2?
AR: Well, we’ve decided that for Volume 2 we’re going to stay close to home and explore some of the interesting stories that are taking place in our own backyard.
SS: For the next installment we’ll mostly be roaming around New York and New Jersey. We’ll still be digging up stories on music, art, sports, and street life, but this time without the seven-day handicap we had in Jamaica.
— Matthew Newton](http://24.media.tumblr.com/c77a4ff0bd35744704c401331d7ff292/tumblr_mk84g9fw331rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
![Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
[[MORE]]
How did the idea for Sevens Clash come about?
Alexander Richter: Sevens Clash was born from the desire to create new work and to collaborate with talented people while doing it.
Sean Stewart: I’m always setting up interviews as an excuse to talk to people doing interesting shit, and a project like Sevens Clash is a great vehicle to help focus (and justify) that mania.
Anthony Harrison: Alex and I actually connected on Instagram after seeing each others’ work posted. It was a mutual respect thing. He told me about the big idea, and I offered up my services to create a brand identity. I looked at Sean’s blog and was blown away. One phone conversation with these cats told me that Sevens Clash was something I needed to be a part of.
What prompted you to choose Kingston for the first volume of Sevens Clash?
AR: Jamaica has long been a place I wanted to visit. I’m a big fan of reggae and dancehall music, so naturally once I started to make pictures, Jamaica was a place that I wanted to go to and cook up some serious work. After connecting with Sean who is from Kingston, it was a no-brainer to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a project documenting and exploring Kingston.
AH: My parents are both Jamaican and emigrated to England in their teens, where I was born. For me, this was a way to grasp my roots. The older I get, the more connected I feel. So when I spoke with Alex and he said, “Trust me man, this is going to be culturally authentic and not some fluff ‘Wha gwan Jamaica?’ piece, I was in. I didn’t actually travel with Alex and Sean, but I was there in spirit.
How did Sean and Anthony’s familial ties and knowledge of Jamaica help the project?
AH: When I think about the premise behind the project as it applies to the art direction, my roots help me to translate our stories to our audience. Jamaica is viewed in a certain light in England and America, so visual communication means that I can call on various cultural cues to get our stories across to a broad and diverse audience in a meaningful and authentic manner. Growing up in a Jamaican household — and being familiar yet somewhat removed — helps me to see things from an objective point of view. As I get older, I’m finding myself digging deeper and making more solid family connections.
AR: Well, the fact that Sean and Anthony have a direct connection to Jamaica was key to the success of Sevens Clash. Since Sean is from Kingston, he was integral to not only helping us link with the right people in order to pursue the stories that we covered, but because he was able to bring a unique voice to our stories. I think Jamaica is often written about by outsiders who don’t understand the complexity of the country, and having Sean writing for us from the perspective of a native Jamaican was essential because he was able to see the stories for what they were and not trying to create something they weren’t.
As for Anthony, even though he wasn’t with us on the ground in Kingston, he understands the culture, the sport, the music, and the food of Jamaica and is able to bring that knowledge to the visual identity that he was creating with each feature. One look at the artwork for our stories and you can tell that Anthony is dialed in. Look at “The Ballad of Tommy Lee,” “Record Shopping At Rockers International,” “Dancehall Bespoke,” or “Organize Dat!” just to name a few, and you will see there is no faking the funk.
What surprised you the most about your trip through Kingston? You were approached by a pimp on Ripon Road.
AR: Ripon was a pretty funny situation because I was so focused on working with the girls that I didn’t really notice him when he rolled up. Some words were exchanged off to the side, but fortunately nothing happened. I shot a few photos of them standing in the middle of the street, and then we dipped off into the night without incident. As for what surprised me the most, that’s a tough question to answer. Jamaica moves in a different way than the States, and as a result my approach had to be different. That being said, it was an amazing place to visit and work.
Corruption, especially among law enforcement, is often talked about when discussing Jamaica. Did you encounter any trouble with police during your trip?
AR: None whatsoever.
SS: In my experience, the difference between the culture of corruption in the United States and Jamaica is one of degree, not kind. And when you really get down to it, it’s mostly a question of style. That being said, we didn’t really have any issues on this trip.
What’s the origin of the name Sevens Clash?
SS: It’s taken from a reggae song called “Two Sevens Clash” by the vocal trio Culture. The songwriter (and lead singer), Joseph Hill, was inspired by a vision of July 7, 1977, as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s rumored prophecy that the oppressed would rise up “when the two sevens meet.” Whether the lyrics were taken literally or metaphorically, Hill’s predictions found easy resonance in the midst of the chaos surrounding the efforts to destabilize Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Recorded in 1976 and pressed up in early 1977, the song was an immediate hit — both at home and in the UK, where the punk and reggae subcultures were then colliding. And I think Anthony’s logo perfectly captures that energy.
You spent a week in Kingston, but have been publishing the stories over a number of months. Can you talk about the thought process behind the publication schedule for the project?
SS: Where possible, we try to peg each piece to a relevant event. The added bonus of the pacing is that we’ve been able to build an audience organically without losing momentum.
AR: This whole project has been based on feeling. I can imagine Volume 2 will be the same.
When you say you “peg each piece to a relevant event,” can you give examples?
SS: Definitely. We waited until right before Sting to drop the Isaiah Laing piece and published the Protoje piece shortly before the iTunes release of his single “Kingston Be Wise.” We put up our piece on the legendary Jamaican flyweight Richard ‘Shrimpy’ Clarke in anticipation of the 2013 season of The Contender, a hugely popular Jamaican boxing reality TV show.
Do you have a destination and subject matter in mind for Volume 2?
AR: Well, we’ve decided that for Volume 2 we’re going to stay close to home and explore some of the interesting stories that are taking place in our own backyard.
SS: For the next installment we’ll mostly be roaming around New York and New Jersey. We’ll still be digging up stories on music, art, sports, and street life, but this time without the seven-day handicap we had in Jamaica.
— Matthew Newton](http://24.media.tumblr.com/8992031d2f6f765e5be9d4990e2ec9aa/tumblr_mk84g9fw331rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
![Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
[[MORE]]
How did the idea for Sevens Clash come about?
Alexander Richter: Sevens Clash was born from the desire to create new work and to collaborate with talented people while doing it.
Sean Stewart: I’m always setting up interviews as an excuse to talk to people doing interesting shit, and a project like Sevens Clash is a great vehicle to help focus (and justify) that mania.
Anthony Harrison: Alex and I actually connected on Instagram after seeing each others’ work posted. It was a mutual respect thing. He told me about the big idea, and I offered up my services to create a brand identity. I looked at Sean’s blog and was blown away. One phone conversation with these cats told me that Sevens Clash was something I needed to be a part of.
What prompted you to choose Kingston for the first volume of Sevens Clash?
AR: Jamaica has long been a place I wanted to visit. I’m a big fan of reggae and dancehall music, so naturally once I started to make pictures, Jamaica was a place that I wanted to go to and cook up some serious work. After connecting with Sean who is from Kingston, it was a no-brainer to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a project documenting and exploring Kingston.
AH: My parents are both Jamaican and emigrated to England in their teens, where I was born. For me, this was a way to grasp my roots. The older I get, the more connected I feel. So when I spoke with Alex and he said, “Trust me man, this is going to be culturally authentic and not some fluff ‘Wha gwan Jamaica?’ piece, I was in. I didn’t actually travel with Alex and Sean, but I was there in spirit.
How did Sean and Anthony’s familial ties and knowledge of Jamaica help the project?
AH: When I think about the premise behind the project as it applies to the art direction, my roots help me to translate our stories to our audience. Jamaica is viewed in a certain light in England and America, so visual communication means that I can call on various cultural cues to get our stories across to a broad and diverse audience in a meaningful and authentic manner. Growing up in a Jamaican household — and being familiar yet somewhat removed — helps me to see things from an objective point of view. As I get older, I’m finding myself digging deeper and making more solid family connections.
AR: Well, the fact that Sean and Anthony have a direct connection to Jamaica was key to the success of Sevens Clash. Since Sean is from Kingston, he was integral to not only helping us link with the right people in order to pursue the stories that we covered, but because he was able to bring a unique voice to our stories. I think Jamaica is often written about by outsiders who don’t understand the complexity of the country, and having Sean writing for us from the perspective of a native Jamaican was essential because he was able to see the stories for what they were and not trying to create something they weren’t.
As for Anthony, even though he wasn’t with us on the ground in Kingston, he understands the culture, the sport, the music, and the food of Jamaica and is able to bring that knowledge to the visual identity that he was creating with each feature. One look at the artwork for our stories and you can tell that Anthony is dialed in. Look at “The Ballad of Tommy Lee,” “Record Shopping At Rockers International,” “Dancehall Bespoke,” or “Organize Dat!” just to name a few, and you will see there is no faking the funk.
What surprised you the most about your trip through Kingston? You were approached by a pimp on Ripon Road.
AR: Ripon was a pretty funny situation because I was so focused on working with the girls that I didn’t really notice him when he rolled up. Some words were exchanged off to the side, but fortunately nothing happened. I shot a few photos of them standing in the middle of the street, and then we dipped off into the night without incident. As for what surprised me the most, that’s a tough question to answer. Jamaica moves in a different way than the States, and as a result my approach had to be different. That being said, it was an amazing place to visit and work.
Corruption, especially among law enforcement, is often talked about when discussing Jamaica. Did you encounter any trouble with police during your trip?
AR: None whatsoever.
SS: In my experience, the difference between the culture of corruption in the United States and Jamaica is one of degree, not kind. And when you really get down to it, it’s mostly a question of style. That being said, we didn’t really have any issues on this trip.
What’s the origin of the name Sevens Clash?
SS: It’s taken from a reggae song called “Two Sevens Clash” by the vocal trio Culture. The songwriter (and lead singer), Joseph Hill, was inspired by a vision of July 7, 1977, as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s rumored prophecy that the oppressed would rise up “when the two sevens meet.” Whether the lyrics were taken literally or metaphorically, Hill’s predictions found easy resonance in the midst of the chaos surrounding the efforts to destabilize Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Recorded in 1976 and pressed up in early 1977, the song was an immediate hit — both at home and in the UK, where the punk and reggae subcultures were then colliding. And I think Anthony’s logo perfectly captures that energy.
You spent a week in Kingston, but have been publishing the stories over a number of months. Can you talk about the thought process behind the publication schedule for the project?
SS: Where possible, we try to peg each piece to a relevant event. The added bonus of the pacing is that we’ve been able to build an audience organically without losing momentum.
AR: This whole project has been based on feeling. I can imagine Volume 2 will be the same.
When you say you “peg each piece to a relevant event,” can you give examples?
SS: Definitely. We waited until right before Sting to drop the Isaiah Laing piece and published the Protoje piece shortly before the iTunes release of his single “Kingston Be Wise.” We put up our piece on the legendary Jamaican flyweight Richard ‘Shrimpy’ Clarke in anticipation of the 2013 season of The Contender, a hugely popular Jamaican boxing reality TV show.
Do you have a destination and subject matter in mind for Volume 2?
AR: Well, we’ve decided that for Volume 2 we’re going to stay close to home and explore some of the interesting stories that are taking place in our own backyard.
SS: For the next installment we’ll mostly be roaming around New York and New Jersey. We’ll still be digging up stories on music, art, sports, and street life, but this time without the seven-day handicap we had in Jamaica.
— Matthew Newton](http://24.media.tumblr.com/95ef353b0948df03c54a035af72ce95d/tumblr_mk84g9fw331rrpm57o6_1280.jpg)
![Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
[[MORE]]
How did the idea for Sevens Clash come about?
Alexander Richter: Sevens Clash was born from the desire to create new work and to collaborate with talented people while doing it.
Sean Stewart: I’m always setting up interviews as an excuse to talk to people doing interesting shit, and a project like Sevens Clash is a great vehicle to help focus (and justify) that mania.
Anthony Harrison: Alex and I actually connected on Instagram after seeing each others’ work posted. It was a mutual respect thing. He told me about the big idea, and I offered up my services to create a brand identity. I looked at Sean’s blog and was blown away. One phone conversation with these cats told me that Sevens Clash was something I needed to be a part of.
What prompted you to choose Kingston for the first volume of Sevens Clash?
AR: Jamaica has long been a place I wanted to visit. I’m a big fan of reggae and dancehall music, so naturally once I started to make pictures, Jamaica was a place that I wanted to go to and cook up some serious work. After connecting with Sean who is from Kingston, it was a no-brainer to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a project documenting and exploring Kingston.
AH: My parents are both Jamaican and emigrated to England in their teens, where I was born. For me, this was a way to grasp my roots. The older I get, the more connected I feel. So when I spoke with Alex and he said, “Trust me man, this is going to be culturally authentic and not some fluff ‘Wha gwan Jamaica?’ piece, I was in. I didn’t actually travel with Alex and Sean, but I was there in spirit.
How did Sean and Anthony’s familial ties and knowledge of Jamaica help the project?
AH: When I think about the premise behind the project as it applies to the art direction, my roots help me to translate our stories to our audience. Jamaica is viewed in a certain light in England and America, so visual communication means that I can call on various cultural cues to get our stories across to a broad and diverse audience in a meaningful and authentic manner. Growing up in a Jamaican household — and being familiar yet somewhat removed — helps me to see things from an objective point of view. As I get older, I’m finding myself digging deeper and making more solid family connections.
AR: Well, the fact that Sean and Anthony have a direct connection to Jamaica was key to the success of Sevens Clash. Since Sean is from Kingston, he was integral to not only helping us link with the right people in order to pursue the stories that we covered, but because he was able to bring a unique voice to our stories. I think Jamaica is often written about by outsiders who don’t understand the complexity of the country, and having Sean writing for us from the perspective of a native Jamaican was essential because he was able to see the stories for what they were and not trying to create something they weren’t.
As for Anthony, even though he wasn’t with us on the ground in Kingston, he understands the culture, the sport, the music, and the food of Jamaica and is able to bring that knowledge to the visual identity that he was creating with each feature. One look at the artwork for our stories and you can tell that Anthony is dialed in. Look at “The Ballad of Tommy Lee,” “Record Shopping At Rockers International,” “Dancehall Bespoke,” or “Organize Dat!” just to name a few, and you will see there is no faking the funk.
What surprised you the most about your trip through Kingston? You were approached by a pimp on Ripon Road.
AR: Ripon was a pretty funny situation because I was so focused on working with the girls that I didn’t really notice him when he rolled up. Some words were exchanged off to the side, but fortunately nothing happened. I shot a few photos of them standing in the middle of the street, and then we dipped off into the night without incident. As for what surprised me the most, that’s a tough question to answer. Jamaica moves in a different way than the States, and as a result my approach had to be different. That being said, it was an amazing place to visit and work.
Corruption, especially among law enforcement, is often talked about when discussing Jamaica. Did you encounter any trouble with police during your trip?
AR: None whatsoever.
SS: In my experience, the difference between the culture of corruption in the United States and Jamaica is one of degree, not kind. And when you really get down to it, it’s mostly a question of style. That being said, we didn’t really have any issues on this trip.
What’s the origin of the name Sevens Clash?
SS: It’s taken from a reggae song called “Two Sevens Clash” by the vocal trio Culture. The songwriter (and lead singer), Joseph Hill, was inspired by a vision of July 7, 1977, as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s rumored prophecy that the oppressed would rise up “when the two sevens meet.” Whether the lyrics were taken literally or metaphorically, Hill’s predictions found easy resonance in the midst of the chaos surrounding the efforts to destabilize Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Recorded in 1976 and pressed up in early 1977, the song was an immediate hit — both at home and in the UK, where the punk and reggae subcultures were then colliding. And I think Anthony’s logo perfectly captures that energy.
You spent a week in Kingston, but have been publishing the stories over a number of months. Can you talk about the thought process behind the publication schedule for the project?
SS: Where possible, we try to peg each piece to a relevant event. The added bonus of the pacing is that we’ve been able to build an audience organically without losing momentum.
AR: This whole project has been based on feeling. I can imagine Volume 2 will be the same.
When you say you “peg each piece to a relevant event,” can you give examples?
SS: Definitely. We waited until right before Sting to drop the Isaiah Laing piece and published the Protoje piece shortly before the iTunes release of his single “Kingston Be Wise.” We put up our piece on the legendary Jamaican flyweight Richard ‘Shrimpy’ Clarke in anticipation of the 2013 season of The Contender, a hugely popular Jamaican boxing reality TV show.
Do you have a destination and subject matter in mind for Volume 2?
AR: Well, we’ve decided that for Volume 2 we’re going to stay close to home and explore some of the interesting stories that are taking place in our own backyard.
SS: For the next installment we’ll mostly be roaming around New York and New Jersey. We’ll still be digging up stories on music, art, sports, and street life, but this time without the seven-day handicap we had in Jamaica.
— Matthew Newton](http://24.media.tumblr.com/6c910b90b14bdba8912a44ba168fb632/tumblr_mk84g9fw331rrpm57o7_1280.jpg)
![Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
[[MORE]]
How did the idea for Sevens Clash come about?
Alexander Richter: Sevens Clash was born from the desire to create new work and to collaborate with talented people while doing it.
Sean Stewart: I’m always setting up interviews as an excuse to talk to people doing interesting shit, and a project like Sevens Clash is a great vehicle to help focus (and justify) that mania.
Anthony Harrison: Alex and I actually connected on Instagram after seeing each others’ work posted. It was a mutual respect thing. He told me about the big idea, and I offered up my services to create a brand identity. I looked at Sean’s blog and was blown away. One phone conversation with these cats told me that Sevens Clash was something I needed to be a part of.
What prompted you to choose Kingston for the first volume of Sevens Clash?
AR: Jamaica has long been a place I wanted to visit. I’m a big fan of reggae and dancehall music, so naturally once I started to make pictures, Jamaica was a place that I wanted to go to and cook up some serious work. After connecting with Sean who is from Kingston, it was a no-brainer to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a project documenting and exploring Kingston.
AH: My parents are both Jamaican and emigrated to England in their teens, where I was born. For me, this was a way to grasp my roots. The older I get, the more connected I feel. So when I spoke with Alex and he said, “Trust me man, this is going to be culturally authentic and not some fluff ‘Wha gwan Jamaica?’ piece, I was in. I didn’t actually travel with Alex and Sean, but I was there in spirit.
How did Sean and Anthony’s familial ties and knowledge of Jamaica help the project?
AH: When I think about the premise behind the project as it applies to the art direction, my roots help me to translate our stories to our audience. Jamaica is viewed in a certain light in England and America, so visual communication means that I can call on various cultural cues to get our stories across to a broad and diverse audience in a meaningful and authentic manner. Growing up in a Jamaican household — and being familiar yet somewhat removed — helps me to see things from an objective point of view. As I get older, I’m finding myself digging deeper and making more solid family connections.
AR: Well, the fact that Sean and Anthony have a direct connection to Jamaica was key to the success of Sevens Clash. Since Sean is from Kingston, he was integral to not only helping us link with the right people in order to pursue the stories that we covered, but because he was able to bring a unique voice to our stories. I think Jamaica is often written about by outsiders who don’t understand the complexity of the country, and having Sean writing for us from the perspective of a native Jamaican was essential because he was able to see the stories for what they were and not trying to create something they weren’t.
As for Anthony, even though he wasn’t with us on the ground in Kingston, he understands the culture, the sport, the music, and the food of Jamaica and is able to bring that knowledge to the visual identity that he was creating with each feature. One look at the artwork for our stories and you can tell that Anthony is dialed in. Look at “The Ballad of Tommy Lee,” “Record Shopping At Rockers International,” “Dancehall Bespoke,” or “Organize Dat!” just to name a few, and you will see there is no faking the funk.
What surprised you the most about your trip through Kingston? You were approached by a pimp on Ripon Road.
AR: Ripon was a pretty funny situation because I was so focused on working with the girls that I didn’t really notice him when he rolled up. Some words were exchanged off to the side, but fortunately nothing happened. I shot a few photos of them standing in the middle of the street, and then we dipped off into the night without incident. As for what surprised me the most, that’s a tough question to answer. Jamaica moves in a different way than the States, and as a result my approach had to be different. That being said, it was an amazing place to visit and work.
Corruption, especially among law enforcement, is often talked about when discussing Jamaica. Did you encounter any trouble with police during your trip?
AR: None whatsoever.
SS: In my experience, the difference between the culture of corruption in the United States and Jamaica is one of degree, not kind. And when you really get down to it, it’s mostly a question of style. That being said, we didn’t really have any issues on this trip.
What’s the origin of the name Sevens Clash?
SS: It’s taken from a reggae song called “Two Sevens Clash” by the vocal trio Culture. The songwriter (and lead singer), Joseph Hill, was inspired by a vision of July 7, 1977, as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s rumored prophecy that the oppressed would rise up “when the two sevens meet.” Whether the lyrics were taken literally or metaphorically, Hill’s predictions found easy resonance in the midst of the chaos surrounding the efforts to destabilize Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Recorded in 1976 and pressed up in early 1977, the song was an immediate hit — both at home and in the UK, where the punk and reggae subcultures were then colliding. And I think Anthony’s logo perfectly captures that energy.
You spent a week in Kingston, but have been publishing the stories over a number of months. Can you talk about the thought process behind the publication schedule for the project?
SS: Where possible, we try to peg each piece to a relevant event. The added bonus of the pacing is that we’ve been able to build an audience organically without losing momentum.
AR: This whole project has been based on feeling. I can imagine Volume 2 will be the same.
When you say you “peg each piece to a relevant event,” can you give examples?
SS: Definitely. We waited until right before Sting to drop the Isaiah Laing piece and published the Protoje piece shortly before the iTunes release of his single “Kingston Be Wise.” We put up our piece on the legendary Jamaican flyweight Richard ‘Shrimpy’ Clarke in anticipation of the 2013 season of The Contender, a hugely popular Jamaican boxing reality TV show.
Do you have a destination and subject matter in mind for Volume 2?
AR: Well, we’ve decided that for Volume 2 we’re going to stay close to home and explore some of the interesting stories that are taking place in our own backyard.
SS: For the next installment we’ll mostly be roaming around New York and New Jersey. We’ll still be digging up stories on music, art, sports, and street life, but this time without the seven-day handicap we had in Jamaica.
— Matthew Newton](http://24.media.tumblr.com/1afc3002bb169eb94854698e98d9cd76/tumblr_mk84g9fw331rrpm57o8_1280.jpg)
![Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
[[MORE]]
How did the idea for Sevens Clash come about?
Alexander Richter: Sevens Clash was born from the desire to create new work and to collaborate with talented people while doing it.
Sean Stewart: I’m always setting up interviews as an excuse to talk to people doing interesting shit, and a project like Sevens Clash is a great vehicle to help focus (and justify) that mania.
Anthony Harrison: Alex and I actually connected on Instagram after seeing each others’ work posted. It was a mutual respect thing. He told me about the big idea, and I offered up my services to create a brand identity. I looked at Sean’s blog and was blown away. One phone conversation with these cats told me that Sevens Clash was something I needed to be a part of.
What prompted you to choose Kingston for the first volume of Sevens Clash?
AR: Jamaica has long been a place I wanted to visit. I’m a big fan of reggae and dancehall music, so naturally once I started to make pictures, Jamaica was a place that I wanted to go to and cook up some serious work. After connecting with Sean who is from Kingston, it was a no-brainer to see if he would be interested in collaborating on a project documenting and exploring Kingston.
AH: My parents are both Jamaican and emigrated to England in their teens, where I was born. For me, this was a way to grasp my roots. The older I get, the more connected I feel. So when I spoke with Alex and he said, “Trust me man, this is going to be culturally authentic and not some fluff ‘Wha gwan Jamaica?’ piece, I was in. I didn’t actually travel with Alex and Sean, but I was there in spirit.
How did Sean and Anthony’s familial ties and knowledge of Jamaica help the project?
AH: When I think about the premise behind the project as it applies to the art direction, my roots help me to translate our stories to our audience. Jamaica is viewed in a certain light in England and America, so visual communication means that I can call on various cultural cues to get our stories across to a broad and diverse audience in a meaningful and authentic manner. Growing up in a Jamaican household — and being familiar yet somewhat removed — helps me to see things from an objective point of view. As I get older, I’m finding myself digging deeper and making more solid family connections.
AR: Well, the fact that Sean and Anthony have a direct connection to Jamaica was key to the success of Sevens Clash. Since Sean is from Kingston, he was integral to not only helping us link with the right people in order to pursue the stories that we covered, but because he was able to bring a unique voice to our stories. I think Jamaica is often written about by outsiders who don’t understand the complexity of the country, and having Sean writing for us from the perspective of a native Jamaican was essential because he was able to see the stories for what they were and not trying to create something they weren’t.
As for Anthony, even though he wasn’t with us on the ground in Kingston, he understands the culture, the sport, the music, and the food of Jamaica and is able to bring that knowledge to the visual identity that he was creating with each feature. One look at the artwork for our stories and you can tell that Anthony is dialed in. Look at “The Ballad of Tommy Lee,” “Record Shopping At Rockers International,” “Dancehall Bespoke,” or “Organize Dat!” just to name a few, and you will see there is no faking the funk.
What surprised you the most about your trip through Kingston? You were approached by a pimp on Ripon Road.
AR: Ripon was a pretty funny situation because I was so focused on working with the girls that I didn’t really notice him when he rolled up. Some words were exchanged off to the side, but fortunately nothing happened. I shot a few photos of them standing in the middle of the street, and then we dipped off into the night without incident. As for what surprised me the most, that’s a tough question to answer. Jamaica moves in a different way than the States, and as a result my approach had to be different. That being said, it was an amazing place to visit and work.
Corruption, especially among law enforcement, is often talked about when discussing Jamaica. Did you encounter any trouble with police during your trip?
AR: None whatsoever.
SS: In my experience, the difference between the culture of corruption in the United States and Jamaica is one of degree, not kind. And when you really get down to it, it’s mostly a question of style. That being said, we didn’t really have any issues on this trip.
What’s the origin of the name Sevens Clash?
SS: It’s taken from a reggae song called “Two Sevens Clash” by the vocal trio Culture. The songwriter (and lead singer), Joseph Hill, was inspired by a vision of July 7, 1977, as the fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s rumored prophecy that the oppressed would rise up “when the two sevens meet.” Whether the lyrics were taken literally or metaphorically, Hill’s predictions found easy resonance in the midst of the chaos surrounding the efforts to destabilize Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government. Recorded in 1976 and pressed up in early 1977, the song was an immediate hit — both at home and in the UK, where the punk and reggae subcultures were then colliding. And I think Anthony’s logo perfectly captures that energy.
You spent a week in Kingston, but have been publishing the stories over a number of months. Can you talk about the thought process behind the publication schedule for the project?
SS: Where possible, we try to peg each piece to a relevant event. The added bonus of the pacing is that we’ve been able to build an audience organically without losing momentum.
AR: This whole project has been based on feeling. I can imagine Volume 2 will be the same.
When you say you “peg each piece to a relevant event,” can you give examples?
SS: Definitely. We waited until right before Sting to drop the Isaiah Laing piece and published the Protoje piece shortly before the iTunes release of his single “Kingston Be Wise.” We put up our piece on the legendary Jamaican flyweight Richard ‘Shrimpy’ Clarke in anticipation of the 2013 season of The Contender, a hugely popular Jamaican boxing reality TV show.
Do you have a destination and subject matter in mind for Volume 2?
AR: Well, we’ve decided that for Volume 2 we’re going to stay close to home and explore some of the interesting stories that are taking place in our own backyard.
SS: For the next installment we’ll mostly be roaming around New York and New Jersey. We’ll still be digging up stories on music, art, sports, and street life, but this time without the seven-day handicap we had in Jamaica.
— Matthew Newton](http://24.media.tumblr.com/481ab1c108e0e8b3883c6478926fbaff/tumblr_mk84g9fw331rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
Sevens Clash on Street Life in Jamaica
Last August, photographer Alexander Richter and writer Sean Stewart set out for Kingston, Jamaica, with a singular vision in mind. The duo planned to document the city’s cultural scene for a new online magazine they founded with friend and graphic designer Anthony Harrison. The publication, dubbed Sevens Clash in homage to the reggae song “Two Sevens Clash” by the band Culture, was conceived as a vehicle to tell the lesser-known stories of Kingston from a street-level point of view. To provide readers with unfiltered access to the city’s art, music, sports, and street life, however, the pair would have to do so in a compressed, one-week time frame — the duration of their self-financed trip.
Stewart, who grew up in Jamaica, had arranged for he and Richter to stay at his father’s home in Kingston. And in order to gain access to a number of sources and subjects in a short amount of time, he enlisted the help of an old friend. “My longtime homie James Porteous, aka JP DA Manager, was our fixer,” Stewart says. “He was instrumental in getting shit together.” The resulting reports and photographs offer a colorful and revealing document of day-to-day life in Kingston — from profiles of dancehall artist Tommy Lee and the aptly named Tattoo Phillip (who is, after all, a tattooist), to record shopping at Rockers on “Beat Street” and late-night encounters on Ripon Road, to name only a few.
View post 2,151 notes -
Ruddy Roye: Photography as Voice for the Voiceless
Radcliffe Roye (Ruddy to his friends) is inspired by, as he puts it, “the raw and gritty lives of grassroots people.” And so, as a self-taught photographer, his images — whether shot in his native Jamaica, where he spends two months each year, or adopted home of Brooklyn — document communities on the margins of society. Over the last decade, Roye has published rich, colorful photo essays on the Sapeur fashionistas of the Congo, Jamaican nightlife culture, single moms, and the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He’s also begun shooting daily with his iPhone, including a series of gritty, black and white images documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that were featured by the New Yorker. We spoke with Roye, 43, about his craft.
Tell us what it was like documenting Hurricane Sandy.
Very hard. I was the only black photographer among a group of four white photographers. They had to save me twice. Both times the people in the neighborhood looked at me and asked why I was there, because there were incidents of looting. And they didn’t know why I would be interested in photographing their neighborhood. How can anybody think like this? I try to answer these social questions in my work.
Do you think being a photographer of color gives you a different perspective?
I take pictures not because I am a photographer of color, but I also understand the importance of telling the colored story from a colored perspective. I am however honored that people see my work as important and that alone inspires and motivates me to take photos.
It seems like photography fulfills a social need for you.
All that I photograph comes under the umbrella of focusing on something that we sometimes might overlook. It’s something that I’m trying to put into focus, so it is not ignored.
You were a writer before you took photos. What drew you to photography in the first place?
When I was growing up, there was this oral tradition that’s always been a part of Jamaican culture. For me, photography came out of that need to tell stories. I returned to Jamaica when I was 28, as a writer for a newspaper. I was working with newspaper photographers. I would be telling them what pictures to take, and I started thinking, why don’t I photograph myself? For me, it was at the nexus of two things that I liked: writing and visually telling stories.
Tell us about documenting Jamaican dancehall culture.
In 2002, Vogue sent me to Jamaica to photograph the dancehall fashion look. I was on assignment, so I had to look differently at the subject. I started to see its colors, the pageantry, and the theater. All my senses were open for the first time to this culture that I grew up with. I came from working-class poor, and the subject of dancehall spoke to that level of society on downwards, to people who have been left, whose lives aren’t recognized. Dancehall allows me to get the people’s image.
You covered Hurricane Katrina as part of a collective. What did you take away from that trip?
Hurricane Katrina was heartbreaking. I had no idea that so much social and racial divide still existing in the South. Poverty was insanely high, not to mention the percentage of black men who were once incarcerated. As a result, I believe that the folks who were affected by the hurricane were discriminated against because they were black but also because they were poor, hardworking folks.
You often snap shots of your children. Do they ever come along with you on photo shoots?
Yes. I did a cover for Jet magazine with Whoopi Goldberg at The View where my son Mosi fired the shutter while I focused the camera. The boys like photography and understand its role in capturing memories and telling stories.
View post 1,710 notes -
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8357954a602ab88be030f0c04aa162db/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d3d62ff91f2ce7eae9dbeed42bc3411a/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/01af25aee213fea881549a2f884d4495/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o4_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/3af9f116e97346deeffc5f70c18e6caa/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/c016b601e6ea9a002306e928c6ee74b8/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o6_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/3acdd032197cae15de18b78b7e7680ae/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o7_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8e42a4dc4cd229d9d641d8132c635938/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o9_r1_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://24.media.tumblr.com/5666274be185a9a08cf01d8442e20fe9/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o8_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/1e77a1ae858a4492d1b102f74bd03b9a/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o10_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
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Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/02fa6c531b51b275040e46a07abf3fc8/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
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