My last post kind of took on European "White Savior Complex" in the e-Waste story. I hesitated before hitting "publish". Was I being too hard on Europeans?
The latest "
European photo-journalist safari" came out the day after. Italian photojournalist Stephano Stranges announced fundraising for his, well, somewhat creepy African series "Victims of our Wealth" or "
Le Vittime della nostra Rizzchessa". Screenshots below...
From his website "
Stranges Images" (which is largely in English, though he's Italian), you get the picture, so to speak. The metal mining exploits Africans to make electronics, and then the Africans are exploited a second time by the selfsame electronics in Agbogbloshie.
Coltan, in other words, the mineral that everyone carries around in his or her pocket, is the object of a long commercial chain that implicates serious consequences in terms of human and environmental rights. This mineral which is used in the production of various high tech materials, is especially fundamental in making smartphones.
The compulsive consumption and the continual updating of these objects, fed by by the media’s barrage of ad campaigns, has caused the coltan industry to grow exponentially since the end of the 1990’s. From that point, there has been the exploitation on the part of large multinationals and the catastrophic consequences regarding the people from areas like DR Congo. My photographic project, therefore, starts in this area of the world, as the initial link in a process that begins with the extraction of the mineral followed by the production of the object (South East Asia) and then moves onto the excessive use in every corner of the planet, ending up in the immense African dump sites (in particular, Ghana).
Now in fairness, I am
greatly concerned by the Coltan Mining in the Congo (have been upfront that Congo and Amazon metal mining was topic Numbro Una since 1980s - that's WHY I got into recycling!). So I have some schadenfreude of my own in Stranges photos of African mining. (Some historical confirmation at bottom).
So I figured what the heck, I'll talk to them about it... by twitter (next page below).
Look at the specific claim made to support the photojournalism.
Data journalists log, Photojournalists flog...
Its name is Agbogbloshie, but when you look for it, you better ask for “Sodom and Gomorrah”, everyone knows it with that name. It is the black dump of the West. 100,000 tons a year including mobiles, fridges, televisions, computers. Here, they are burnt, opened, selected, recycled and re-sold, to then enter again the cycle of production and sale. 80,000 is the estimated population, mainly coming from the North and the most depressed areas of Ghana.
80,000 residents managing 100k tons per year of foreign waste? What does that look like? Do you see that in their photos?
I saw 25 people in Agbogbloshie, managing 500 lbs per day of wire. It was mostly from automobile consoles. It was not
EVEN hysterically remotely close to the photojournalist claims, and the photojournalists own photos prove my points - and disprove theirs!
