It has been a long silence here in the blog. Beginning of June I stopped writing here in the moment, when we started what is maybe my most ambitious project to date – HUMANS. Now, after seven months, we are back in Denmark from our trip from toe to top of Africa, interviewing people about the basic questions of life. The result is a series of 60 multimedia shortfilms that will slowly be edited over the coming year. Each film will portrait one of the persons interviewed. So, a big project that needed my whole focus in the last months and will partly need it in the coming ones. You can see a bit of what we did with HUMANS so far and read some of the stories we worked on and about the people we met on the website.

Now it’s time to focus a bit on other projects again after the very intense and also sometimes exhausting work on HUMANS. And after the long time I’m looking forward to get back to this blog here and write about multimedia, transmedia, photography and share with you great work of others that inspire me. I’ll try to keep the blog updated at least once a week, but bare with me if I’m too busy sometimes.

For today I’ll just leave you with one picture. This is John from Malawi, the most energetic, positive man I’ve met for a long time. At the age of 93 (and yes, we did not believe it as well, but saw the birth certificate…) he is still going strong and looks sometimes scarily close to a twenty year old that is in the prime of his life. A true inspiration for life, love and happiness! More about him soon on the website of the HUMANS project.

]]> http://www.simonsticker.com/2012/01/16/we-are-back-after-seven-months-through-africa/feed/ 0 http://www.simonsticker.com/2011/06/10/this-blog-is-closed-humans-is-starting/ http://www.simonsticker.com/2011/06/10/this-blog-is-closed-humans-is-starting/#comments Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:37:35 +0000 Simon Sticker http://www.simonsticker.com/?p=3599

As most of you here know, we are about to start our latest project called HUMANS. In a few hours we are flying down to Capetown, South Africa and will travel from there for the next six months up to Cairo. Along the way we will do interviews with people we will meet about life, dreams, wishes, important moments and what else is important in the general questions of life. Each of those persons will get his/her own little shortfilm. We hope that this could create a little bit of an in our opinion often missed linked in our understanding of the continent and will show a lot of it’s diversity, differences and similarities, not only in Africa, but also in comparison to the western world.

The bad news is: This blog here will be closed for the time of the journey.

The good news: There will be a lot happening at the project’s website with the produced films, posts from our experiences “behind the scenes” during the journey, more stories and a lot of pictures. So make sure to head over, subscribe to the RSS feed and if this is still not enough, follow us on Twitter & Facebook to get the full package.

I hope this will become a great project to follow for all of you! Thanks!

When we started working on the concept for HUMANS, one of the driving forces behind the idea for me always was and is the very limited picture we get about Africa, it’s countries, the lifes of the people, the cultures and so on. The reporting between Safari and fancy holiday resorts and the catastrophies of war, Aids, famines, corruption and so on, was not at all fitting into what I experienced and what people told me. Obviously this parts are a part of the lifes of many and especially the stories about the things that go wrong are very important stories to be told, but I believe that for the understanding we need more – a fuller, richer picture that covers not only this stories but also the normal life, the good stories, the stories of innovation, success and the things people in the western world could learn from a lot. Maybe this richer picture will also lead to a new perception for this continent and with that also a higher awareness for it’s problems. First, because it is easier to relate to when your picture is not only about something far away from your own reality, but second also we get a deeper understanding what allows to put things better into perspective.

The writer/photographer duo Brandan Bannon and Mike Pflanz tried exactly that with their project about Nairobi. They devoted the whole month of April to tell different stories from there. Every day they posted a new story on their blog, both with pictures and text, covering stories from food costs, streetkids to mobile phone use and car ownership. They wanted to capture a glimpse into the variety of this megapolis on the rise. In their own words:

Daily Dispatches: Nairobi is an innovative exploration through photojournalism of a fast-evolving 21st-century African city, unfolding day by day in real time. We will spend each day of April searching out stories from all corners of Kenya’s capital, stories which will paint a compelling, informative and surprising portrait of the city, and the lives lived by those who call it home. Each day, we will send our images and reports back to a series of US universities and colleges we’re working with, who will in turn print them and mount them in an exhibition which grows day by day.

Make sure to take a few minutes and check out the stories they covered in their project and get a deeper insight into the life in todays Nairobi.

It is obvious that news don’t have the capacity to cover this broad spectrum of stories and when we look in other parts of the world, exactly the same happens. A friend came back from Japan recently and what he told was quite different to the picture we get in the news right now. It is a problem and an advantage of news to cover the stories when they unfold, but when this is the only picture we get it creates misunderstandings and misperceptions of the countries, the lifes of the people and at the end also the reality. What projects like Daily Dispatches or also our project HUMANS can do is not to replace classic coverage and storytelling, but to add some layers that are hard to add in normal coverage and through that help to create less narrow-sighted pictures of the places we hear about.

While back home in Copenhagen for once I came together with the guys of Von Dü to record some video for their latest release, their new single ‘Sommer I Denmark’. The release party is next saturday at Amager Bio in Copenhagen with a nice pre-release party for what the guys already bought a couple of thousand beers. So if you are in town, make sure to pass by as it will be a lot of fun.

Working with Von Dü is a nice change from most of my normal work and is a great playground to try out ideas and also learn a lot as it gives me a different angle to approach my video and photography work. For instance thinking of the difficult light situations at concerts needed for sure a bit of a learning curve at the start, but made me on the long run way more confident with that also in other situations for instance a small dark hut somewhere. The nice thing is that what ever you do, if you stay open for what it teaches you, it will bring you further also in other parts of your work.

As a side note for everyone who is following HUMANS: The flights to Capetown are booked for the 10th of June and from there we will travel up the eastcoast till we will hopefully reach Cairo at some point in December. So it’s a big tour and I’m quite excited to see Humans come alive and hear all those stories and share it with you. We are also planning right now to do some kind of streetart projections and lectures along the way to bring the stories back to the people, something I’m quite excited about too. So if the blog here get’s calm from beginning of June, don’t be surprised, we will update the Humans blog in return quite regularly with stories, pictures, videos and so on to give you a good behind the scenes look into the project in the making and our trip plus of course the shortfilms we will produce about the people we’ll meet. If you are not familiar with the project yet: You can learn more here.

Some might have seen it already: We launched the project “HUMANS” last week and with it we also decided to try out the new possibilities of crowdfunding with Kickstarter. We hope that with enough backers we could generate not only some last needed funds to make stage one of “HUMANS” happen, the first leg through Africa from June to December, but also give directly something back from the amazing experiences and stories people will share with us along the way. First: Here is our little trailer:

How does Kickstarter work?

Kickstarter is a crowd-funding platform that allows users to back creative projects, mainly small projects like ours that does not have big financiers in their back. So this becomes your job. But like doing an investment you also get something back at the end when the project happens. This could be in our case everything from ebooks, prints of photographs, personal postcards from Africa, video downloads and so on. Check it out yourself, I think it’s worth it. The trick with Kickstarter is that your money will only been taken when the project reaches it’s funding goal.

For us the decision to make this campaign through Kickstarter has two major reasons. The first is obvious: It helps us get some needed funds to make the project happen. When that would be the only reason, I think we would not have made it and instead would seeked for some bigger companies to sponsor the project (aka the classical way). That leads to reason number two: The project is highly depending on the community effect. We want to reach many people with it and make it something what helps all of us to gain a better understanding of different cultures, here in first place the different cultures of Africa. But we also want to get as many people engage with the project in different ways, last but not least through sharing their own stories. And to be true, we also hope that supporting a project with a small amount of money also raises the interest in the long run as bit and make you a true follower.

Ok, I can understand if you don’t feel like supporting the project with money you might not have. But first, support starts with one Dollar, so not even a third of your coffee in the morning (even when I can understand that this is something really important). So we made it as easy as possible and even for that amount you get something back beside our Thank you!

Are there other ways to support the project?

When you still not feel like supporting the project with your money, no worries, we are also more than happy when you help us with the project by spreading the word for it. Share it on facebook, on your blog, tell your friends about it or just stay in touch with the project on the website. There are many ways to show us some love, make us happy and spread the word about HUMANS. And we are 100% sure that this project will be interesting for anyone who is interested in stories, cultures, people, travel, adventures or this big thing what we call life.

Recently, when I had Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit fame back in Copenhagen for a visit, we had a long talk about what drives photography in the photojournalism biz (You can hear a bit of it in the Skype talk we had a week later here). Aesthetics are for sure one of the driving forces in photography. And it is also alright, but the question is more, what comes first. What is more important to you? The story you want to tell or your aesthetic expression of it? The artist or the subject?

A lot of photographers I know, tell me that they love photography and are not so interested in other forms of media like audio and video for instance. Also that is alright of course, but talking about my own motivation, I use these forms not first, because I’m interested in them, but because they allow me in certain stories just another, sometimes better way to tell the story. Take a story like the one of Clotide, only the combination of the different forms give you the depth the story deserves. The pictures might tell a good part, but they are capturing the moment, not the history. The audio gives another layer to it and the video as well. So we get more of the story. So that was in this case the main reason for recording the story in that way.

But what has that to do with the aesthetics? In this example the story came first, the use of media and also the use of visual language, aesthetics came second to find a way to tell the story in the best way I could do. But what would have happened if I would have put the aesthetics first? I would used maybe a certain style that I like, like always open aperture or everything with 1/4 of a second to get things blurred moving or I would have thought of some series to do, like portraits at any place that is important to her. Light, lines, shapes would have maybe become more important than what we see in the pictures. I would have way more been on a track to actually create art and not tell a story. That does not mean that aesthetics are not important, but I think we should think more of what we want to tell rather than how we could make a compelling picture. The compelling picture is for the ego first, the story is about the person, not about us.

I remember one day in this old school in Rwanda where during the genocide 50.000 people were killed. Part of the dead bodies are conserved in the rooms and I was there to take photographs. A horrific place and the purpose of taking pictures was the only thing that kept me from emotionally breaking down while I was there. Later I was looking at the pictures and it striked me that some of them had this powerful aesthetics in it, what I loved at that time. Today I look at them and I’m not sure if I did a good job. Aesthetically, ya, maybe, but did I tell the story properly? I’m not sure. Another picture is nothing less than a lie for me today. There is nothing staged or so, but it is a lie, because of where it takes people that look at it. While I was in one of the rooms, I saw this big dirty part on the wall (no painting or something like that) that looked a bit like Africa in it’s form. With the head of one of the bodies in the foreground, a picture would create a powerful connection and tell a story. I was fascinated by that at the time. Easy to tell, easy to understand. But what I created was a stereotypical lie about Africa and the perception of the continent in the western world. It is just another excuse to make it easy to see no need to learn and understand more of the continent or ask.

This example is not only about aesthetics, but about how easy it could be to be driven to simplify or even lie with your pictures, when it makes a compelling image. There are thousands of examples for that out there, especially from the developing world. But isn’t it time to move on from that? Photojournalism is full of those lies and it does not have to be staged or over-photoshopped to make aesthetics taking the lead over the story or to tell lies in the worst case. Photography is highly subjective, but that is why a business like photojournalism can only can only be important in any way when integrity and the story comes first and is what drives the aesthetics. As long as we celebrate “style over substance” as Benjamin called it, we are moving photojournalism into art galleries and make it a club for itself, but with no further value for someone who is not interested in photography but in pictures as a form of communication as the pictures don’t tell me enough or something new. They just encourage to keep the relaxed picture in black and white of the developing world and don’t start thinking further or even ask questions.

Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit fame came up to Copenhagen recently for a visit and to work on a project in Malmö, Sweden. Unfortunately we did not find the time for a little interview chat during that time, but set down a week later for a chat on Skype about multimedia, the future of photojournalism and the picture of developing countries in the Western world. So get yourself a coffee and listen to some interesting thoughts and critique about the mentioned topics. I know it’s sometimes controversial to say the least, so I’m happy when you take part in the discussion here in the comments or over at the duckrabbit blog that is bringing up discussions about this topics regularly. Also make sure you check adevelopingstory.org for discussions about the picture of the developing world. And last but not least check some of Benjamin’s great work here.

You wanna know how to find THE iconic picture from Africa? So here are some tips. First, you have two choices in which direction you want to go. Dig into the world of the wild animals and even wilder tribes, that run around naked and eat raw flesh. Or you can go in the direction of the “Starving African”.

The first one is easy. Make sure you get on some Safari and see lions next to some dancing Massai with bushdrums. Take pictures of that. Make sure that you never show anything what could even remind of civilization. When you take the picture, try to get a look as if these people are from before our time. That is important to tell later, how crazy it is that they are still living in such a primitive way. Maybe artificial light is even a good idea to make it even more statue like and away from this world. Focus on the exotic and do everything that people can’t see anything related to our world. It would destroy the feeling of far away.

You are more the hardcore warphotographer type of person? No problem, Africa is your feeding ground. As we know, Africa is a country full of war, famine, rape, corruption  and suffering. So you will find plenty of work to do. Make sure you don’t fall in the trap of looking for something else. There isn’t (beside the wild animals of course). So don’t even look for it. What you look for are a couple of important elements for your pictures. An AK-47 is one of it. But even better could be a club or machete. Yes, this is how they kill themselves every day. So make sure to have it in your pictures. You can only find them using it in the field? Then make them pose in a proper way. Good is always combination of the machete, powerful hands and a naked body (to underline the wildness). No one will care. And if someone asks, just make sure you have a bunch of horror stories to tell about how they use it. That will keep people silent. The starving African is another important element for your pictures. Because they are doing both, they starve or they kill themselves, when they are not right now dying of HIV/Aids. Starving children work especially. There is nothing more moving as a crying starving child, left alone in the wild, without any help in sight.

If you want to make sure that people also see the help that is arriving, never forget to exclude every African aid worker. They are anyway only servants for the wonderful whites that come to safe this dark and lost continent. So, don’t confuse people with including them in your pictures. When you show people in the IDP camps, make sure that they are either looking sad and angry. Yes, because even with all our so selfless help they are not even a little bit thankful. So show this contrast of the caring aid worker and the unthankful African. And only show long lines of hands, begging for food. Make sure that it always looks like chaos. That will implement that there is no way to actually bring any order and structure to this people. Also make sure that there is nothing else to see than their miserable homes or the white aid workers that bring the food. Always good is also the caring celebrity. Show them listening, always and also to Africans. That is important, because they care. And you care too, so make sure your pictures transport that.

When you come across dead bodies make sure to make as many pictures as possible. That are the bread and butter shoots. Don’t think about composition or stuff like that. Who cares about that when you see this great example of the real cruel world of Africa. Never show bodies as something human. It doesn’t matter who the person was as there are thousands of others that are killed too and it also avoids feelings of the spectator to get a too close relation to it. It might only disturb him over the one minute of donation giving. So it’s also good to use some symbols, like some blood and a necklace in the form of Africa. That tells enough. Horror. Africa. And you can of course also change the symbol easily, for instance the AK-47, machete or an empty plate.

Important, and I guess you already came to this conclusion yourself, ALWAYS shoot in black and white. This world is just black and white. It’s the story about the good and the bad. And Africa is a dark continent and choosing black and white also gives all the suffering the for us abstract feel. It’s also more like Art and at the end this is more how it should be. Otherwise stuff might come too close. Also make sure that some vignettes appear regularly in your pictures and the general setup is dark. Even try to rise the contrast to get out the texture in the faces if you can. Always good to create some dynamic is also to make sure the horizon is never straight and some hand, in the best case with a machete, is coming into the picture from the side. It must feel that you were close in the action. Or don’t you want people asking you how you get so close and how you survived this unimaginable horror that is happening down there? Never forget: this is about you. YOU want to change the WORLD with your pictures, not the life of a person. You think BIG! The people you photograph are objects that tell the story of something way bigger and way more important. So never get too close on a personal level. People might start thinking they have their own voice and own opinion.

Ok, you are a critical person, I can see. You tell me there are also good things happening and you want to photograph that? Make sure you get to a school. Because education is really the ONLY thing that helps. Make sure to photograph a classroom with at least 70 children. This will give the perspective that even in this difficult circumstances they are so happy to learn. Make sure you have that, that they all look really happy to learn something, when you take the picture. They are the future of this continent and because we build all those schools, they can learn and get out of the horror. And if you show any kind of joy, make sure it is when they are dancing. Because the only joy they have is singing and dancing.

Before I come to an end, a little advice: If you are doing some lectures or interviews about your experiences, make sure you always talk about we and them. Also make sure that you mention that you expected it horrific, but not that much out of control, hopeless and horrific.

You have read all of it? Now there is only one more step to do. Keep all of that in mind and look for everything else but that. Find the daily life, find the modernization and the joy of life. Find the hope and hospitality. Find the hard working and the specialities of each country. And most important find the beauty. There is a lot going wrong in many countries in Africa, without a doubt. But there is also a lot where each one can learn from and get inspired by. And I promise, what you will find the most is the daily life, the normality and the maybe even a bit boring parts of it. And that is something to explore and might give a more in depth and diverse picture of a continent that is the most diverse and rich in history on this planet.

“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. - Chimamanda Adichie

Watch this, i have nothing to add. I promise, next time you go out to cover a story you will think differently about it. An amazing talk of an extraordinary woman.