Euro Agbo Photo Journos Redux 1: The Butterfly and the Whale (enacted by 2 roosters)

With the help of Ghana Tech Wahab Odoi, and the miracles of the internet, I have managed to put together a lot of the pieces behind the strange alt-coinish entry by the  band Placebo.  Their MTV video's use of Agbogbloshie as a backdrop for "Life is What You Make It" debuted during the middle of this blog's series on Euro Agbo Porno Photo Journos.

As far as making friends with people you run into in strange places - well, chalk this chicken fight up to unfortunate timing.

I was in the middle of a "photo journo flog" series.  And Sasha Rainbow was thrilled with what seems her studio's most prestigious work to date. And the band and Placebo fans were unprepared to play a part in an environmental lesson plan.  What does work for photography often does not work as journalism?... um no it's about the music dude.

Artists look for simplicity - a simple, powerful photo can tell a thousand words. But those words may be false, and quite easily proffer mere racial profiling.  I brought their video into the "Free Joe Hurricane Benson" debate, and they seem angry and perturbed.  Easier to describe me as a trollish brute than to entertain the possibility that their depiction of poverty was bleeding with collateral damage, and wrapped in #ewaste activist folly.

How did we meet in this place?  All of us? How does Awal, Yahroo or Razak wind up with a Whatsapp treasuretrove of white contacts from UK, USA, Spain, etc?  Since just the last month, I've been sent photos and been handed by phone to speak directly to five "freelance documentary makers".  It's a land rush... but they don't know what kind.

Pick Your Story: Anyone can PhotoJournal in Africa!

Impressed by Washington Post, Guardian, Independent, National Geographic, and NGOs documenting "Ewaste Crime"?

Don't be!  It's easy!  You can call, on the phone, today, the poster "children" (in their 20s) who adorn the pages of guilt-staining photojournalism.

Some of the photos below are from expensive documentaries.  Others - of the same people - were taken with the dudes over lunch, or sent to me by WhatsApp or Facebook.   Everyone can be like Essick, Hugo, Belini, McElvaney and other photojournalists.  Fly to Accra airport, the "Agbogobloshie" dump is just 20 minutes away.  Spend the night at the Movenpick Hotel.

What are you waiting for?  GET YOUR PULITZER!

It's incredibly easy!  You can do it, too!  And  unlike people who live there, or try to engage in trade, you get paid and don't even need to learn any names.  Take the money and run.

Or if you like, stay and interview Mohamed Saidu Rachid (top) and Awal Basit (bottom).  Stay involved and stay engaged.

"E-waste Crimes in Ghana" 10: A Convenient Lie in Agbogbloshie

Fritz Lang's Metropolis film inspired Joeseph Goebbells, Adoph Hitler's Nazi propagandist, to try to hire him for the white supremacy movement.  What "e-waste" film documentaries should learn from Lang.

So, have we all enjoyed the photos of fire and sweaty young recycling men?  Have we proven that we care?  Have we validated our recycling credentials, proven our concern, certified out downstreams, and licensed our morality?

Fritz Lang's Metropolis inspired Goebbels

Not wanting to boycott reuse technicians in Tamale does not mean we care less than you do about wire burners in Accra who are exposed to toxic soil.  Hopefully, my concern justifies my own photos.  Because that's what Agbogbloshie is.  It's a photo backdrop.  Just a nice mashup of shantytown, smoke, gadget debris and glistening muscles.  It has become a cheap movie set for #ewastehoax propaganda.

The Tamale reuse workers not only support themselves, they usually support several others in their Dagbani speaking tribe who could otherwise feel forced to move to Agbogbloshie (Accra), Ghana to burn wires.  And their scrap brothers in Agbogbloshie support not only themselves, but their own children, siblings, and parents.

This is ultimately addressed to Lord Chris Smith, because the UK has given itself a special role as "steward" of the Dagbani and the secondary market in West Africa.  He has proven his environmental credentials by circulating stories about the "largest e-waste dump on earth", the "most toxic recycling on earth", and has issued press releases crowing about Mighty Joe Benson.

Clang go the prison bars.

Yet clang, clang, clang go the Agbogbloshie scrap metal workers.  Stop all the exports, arrest every #freejoebenson... Yet the beat goes on.

"E-Waste Crimes in Ghana" 9 - Great White Savior Gam

We revisited Agbogbloshie in urban Accra yesterday.   Having 9 days in Tamale, learning the Dagbani context, was important.  It honed and shaped our thinking.  Wahab and his 2 cousin/friends could focus their Dagbani translation on our questions, rather than siphon off the translation for American and Italian reporters.  As importantly, we had 9 days to think about the questions we didn't think to ask on the first day.

Since it was Agbogbloshie, of course there was yet another documentary being filmed that day... Justin from New York said he's a masters degree film student.   That's basically all he'd tell us.

This time we got to the wire-burning "hot spot" via the long and windy route.   We saw much, much more of the scrap metal site and trash dump.  It is indeed impressive in the context of a city of 1 million residents.  Of course, this city has closer to 5 million.   Recyclers will get my point... there has to be a lot of stuff still out in the city somewhere, waiting for a decision maker to let it be recycled.

money shot

The white photojournalist had Awal (Howell) set up along the canal, sitting on a TV housing, with his back to the tire fires east of him.  We took a vantage point under the sun canopy where the scrap burners and hanger-abouters rest and have lunch.

Agbogbloshie as a scrapyard has little to do with wire burning, and the wire burning has much more to do with automobile wire than with "e-waste".  But those wire fires, while a very small part of the equation, attract thrill seekers - unemployed teenagers and #greatwhitesaviors like me and "Justin".  

The site, seen from above, is mostly scrap automobiles, motorcycles, and bus recycling,.  It's not the largest electronics dump in the world, not even in the top 100.  Given the number of African households who have had electroncs for decades, there should be much more e-scrap.  "E-waste" is a very small part of the scrap, apparently because Africans are still holding onto it, "speculating" that used electronics they don't use now will be sellable to someone.  Today's Agbogbloshie is probably the tip of an iceberg as decades of reuse and repair will eventually cascade from a next generation of smart phone users.