29JUL2009
By Gary Fong
Of all the vocations one could choose to spend the rest of their life applying, photography is special. What other profession can, in an instant, cause people to rally together to change the world?
I run into a lot of young photographers with bright ideas and a yearning use their photography for humanitarian work. But what work might that be? Making images that touch the readers to cause a heartfelt reaction?
One such photographer is Kristen Nicole Sayres, working with an international nonprofit in Africa. In the course of her work, Sayres looks for images that will illuminate and enlighten the lives of people in the world community. A very lofty ambition…but someone has to do it. It might as well be Kristen.
At dawn, she cames across a boy face down, in his own vomit, lying in a sewer on an empty street in Nairobi. if this were in a small town in America, one would call 911 to bring help in minutes. But this is in Kenya, where gangs of boys deaden the pains of hunger and dreams of a better life by sniffing glue from a bottle.
These are the lost boys of Kenya. Fighting over scraps of food or for dominance among themselves is a daily ritual. It’s a place where no one cares what happens to these young lives. It’s a place where, simply, no one cares.
Certain images touch people in ways nothing else can. It can stir the depth of our goodness, calling us to respond to the needs of others. The first photos Sayres sent were fine, Figures 2 and 3. They give us a marginal context to the story, but a sense of detachment.
Figure 2
Figure 3
The emotional connections come when our eyes touch the eyes of the subject as in Figure 1. Those eyes communicate a wealth of knowledge about who, what, where, when and maybe why. There are images where the eyes tell stories that transcend words. Pictures like these are compelling, that reach out and grab ones thoughts or hearts.
Compelling images facilitate the reaction from the viewer. That reaction could be as simple as a greater appreciation of nature or as deeper appreciation for the human spirit. The more admirable qualities are those photos that cause people stand up to remedy the injustices in the world.
After reflecting on the lost boy photos on her CF card, Sayres felt obligated to help in some way. Those images stayed in her mind all day. She brought a friend back to the dirty street where the boys called home. They persuaded the boy, who originally caught Kristen’s heart, to come with them for food and shelter.
Later they took the boy home to his mother, who thought he stole money from her, threatened to kill him if he ever came back, and kicked him out. At the urging of Kristen and her friend, the mother took the boy back home.
Never before has a story affected Sayres as much as the lost boys. She’s a journalist, objectively telling stories for her readers to gain an understanding of the world around them. But that day, Kristen was herself changed by the images she made.
Some pictures can change the world. Some images can change a life
