photography

How photography captures more than just a moment

Good photography not only tells a story but prompts a series of questions about the subject — what happened to make that woman’s face so cragged, what happened to the child after the photographer turned away, how did that landscape become so ravaged, what’s going on inside the rooms of that building reflected on the shiny surface of that skyscraper?

Picturing the past: How Uganda changed one family’s fortune

Nearly all the families who belong to the Ugandan Asian Diaspora have either a collection of photographs or a series of tired-looking but carefully-preserved albums in which their past is visually documented. Photographs were one of the few things that were not confiscated by Idi Amin’s military as the Asian community reluctantly and with heavy hearts checked out through Entebbe Airport in October 1972.

Fame, famine and the aid game

“There is nothing like a disaster to boost an aid agency’s profile.”  It’s a truism evidenced by every humanitarian crisis in recent history, from the Sudanese famine captured by Kevin Carter’s iconic photograph as described in The Bang Bang Club, to the crisis now gripping West Africa.