Roger Hicks
Veteran
I honestly think if you're going to photograph poverty you should at least "live" with the poverty. Become part of the impoverished. Make friends with those in the situation. Shake hands with poverty itself.
What I mean is, I can easily walk around town, eating well, living well and shooting (as Ebino suggested) the impoverished from a distance (or even up close) but this does not help my truly understand their situation. If I want to really get the photos that can help me help them (and vice versa) then I honestly believe I would have to live with them in order to understand and truly empathize.
This is merely my opinion mind you.
Cheers,
Dave
Dear Dave,
"Live with" in what sense? You can't live under their roof: it's already overcrowded. You can however share their food (preferably when you're paying, though it's hard to refuse hospitality), their celebrations, their work.
In other words, you treat them as equals as far as you can. Once I was photographing Transylvanian haystacks. They're odd conical things, built around a sort of sapling, which is a bugger to get planted in the ground. I passed an old lady, an old widder-woman by the look of it, who was trying to get one planted. She had no-one to help. Except me. So I did.
I had a Land Rover and was 20-30 years younger than she. I still had a living partner. Oh: and a Leica. We weren't material equals. But I could still help her, as one human being to another.
Still in Transylvania, there was the 3-mile lift we gave, in the drizzle, at the fall of evening, to a goat-herd. It saved him an hour's walk. I was honoured when he insisted on giving me a kilo of fresh goat-cheese as a thank-you. In other words, he treated me as an equal, not as a benefactor ex machina.
And Newspaperguy is spot on. Objectivity is a joke. Either wer'e openly partisan -- as I am for Tibet or the success of the European Union -- or we stick with the mealy-mouthed pretension that we're telling 'both sides of the story' -- which we never do, except in the unlikely event that we don't give a toss about which side is in the right, in which case, why are we reporting it? I want the Chinese out of Tibet (and Uighurstan, and 60% of the land area claimed by the Chinese Empire). I want the EU to succeed. not least because both my grandfathers were killed at sea in WW2, one off Crete, one on the Russian convoys. And I look with some contempt upon those who have no passion for anything.
Cheers,
R.