BREATHING IN KABWE
Funded in part by the Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship, I traveled to Kabwe, Zambia to photograph the effects of lead pollution on the local population. In preparing for the trip, and especially during my stay there, the initial idea evolved to include not only an illustrated essay about people living in an entirely lead-tainted environment but also a deconstruction of the act of photographing the Other as well.
That is, throughout the months I lived in Kabwe I was only too aware of myself, and my own cultural positioning that constituted a very powerful filter through which I viewed things. My own biases that I came to know or became more aware of were just too close to the surface, and they often intervened in the work. No matter how liberal my attitudes, I could not disregard the presence of a multi-layered, almost unbridgeable gap between the Kabweans I lived with and myself. In their eyes, and even because of their own biases, I was merely a visitor, a passerby with a fancy camera who never had to deal with the problems of sheer survival to the extent they did. For the most part I did not feel comfortable photographing and was hesitant to comment on something I did not fully understand. I was stiff, almost mechanical, fearing to cross the line and offend my hosts.
I realized that my images alone could never tell that side of the story. I could not dismiss the in many ways painful, instructive, emotional, and enlightening process that resulted in the images themselves. Therefore, I invited Donald Mengay, a writer, professor of English Literature at Baruch College, and my friend to join me on the trip and write a memoir of our experiences. In the actual prints I have reproduced Donald's manuscript and handwrote the text alongside the images. Rather than privilege either verbal or visual text as the more "authentic," i.e. closer to "reality," I have tried to show the way in which each type of representation imparts a small, though important, perspective on what I came to decipher as "the real."
Ultimately the project has become part travel journal, part interview, part documentary, part autobiography, and part revelation. In short, this project is my way of approaching a typical documentary subject matter in such a way that it has become not only about the observed or the observer as individual entities, not about "us" or "them" as two very distinct cultures, but primarily about the relationship between the two.