It’s so much a part of our world, our innate curiosity about people. We like to look at pictures of them! We like to take them and we like to look at them. It’s what we do as human beings that have this tool—the camera. it’s just so much a part of understanding the world that we have to negotiate with it. We have to figure it out.

“During that month,” he told me, “I would sit with families in their homes in Kibera for an hour or two, talking. And by the end of our conversation, they would have pulled out these amazing, old photographs from shoeboxes that they had never shown anybody outside of their own family. This documentation of the Nubian community was something that nobody had ever seen before. So the pieces of this project were already all there

I deleted my article. I was aghast. But I could also see the reasons for their decisions. The long-term benefits to transparency seemed to outweigh the short-term benefits in theory, but in real life, it was impossible to choose to jeopardize so many lives.

Should photographers be paid to work for NGO’s?

Well, YES! And no. I mean, of course! Except…sometimes not.

This is a complicated question.

I recently decided to put a Creative Commons license on my website. And here’s why.

At Place de Marron Camp there is a strong sense of both supportive camaraderie and angry desperation. Preparation for the Monday protest again President Preval was ongoing, with angry demands for work, food, solutions. The leadership and response vacuum from the central government continues, and despair and anger are mounting.

Activist Award Director Kathleen Hennessy travels to Guatemala as a volunteer photographer and meets Claudia Jona, an 11-year-old Mayan girl. “Being journalists, we are trained not to get too close, to be objective. How can you be objective when it comes to a suffering child? But, here, I am not working as a journalist. I am a volunteer. I have permission to care. I have permission to give.”

Fazal Sheikh is an artist and activist based in Zurich, Switzerland. His work has been widely exhibited, in institutions ranging from the Tate Modern to the Princeton University Art Museum to small huts in rural India. He has collaborated with numerous foundations and non-governmental-organizations, and he has won, among many other awards, a MacArthur Prize.

I asked him to do an interview with the PhotoPhilanthropy blog because he approaches collaboration, strategic partnerships and accessibility in a way that I find very inspiring.

I have learned more about my country, and the major social issues people are facing in it, from a “fictional” television show than I have from mainstream news media in the last couple of years. And that’s because I watched the Wire.
I am a proselytizer for the Wire. [...]

All is not lost when people such as these give their time and resources so readily to help children that are most at need. Two agencies. and individuals, that fit together admirably to try to meet some of the needs of children of less than fortunate circumstance are People Improvement Organization (PIO) and Kids International Dental Services.(KIDS)

” We provide dental care to children in orphanages where they come after being abandoned by parents, family members. They are forgotten children of sex slavery, dead parents of AIDS, gang violence, street accidents. We have seen and treated over 1000 children during our stay in Cambodia”.