In my previous post i researched the differences that foreign aid can have and how when you split it up into government and non government organisations you can see the differences which emerge between how much they actually help. I came to the opinion that non government organisations although they don’t have the ability to make a differences on a big scale they are able to make a more positive contribution to the community and help on a better level improving the economy rather than weakening it.  However as these non government organisations are usually smaller charity the question is brought about how they make there funding and get a team of people to usually go over and help in third world countries.

A lot of the time funding comes due to promoting the work and the help that they are giving to people who have it a lot worse then ourselves. Non government organisations aswell as government driven ones will often play on the fact that innocent people are dying, suffering and struggling to survive to make people feel guilty and then they will often contribute in forms of donations or actually volunteering their help. The part that is linking this area of foreign aid to my photographic personal investigation is the fact that photography and video are often used as promotional material to receive funds and volunteers. For government organisations they tend to have famous, world known professions photojournalists to capture images which are often propaganda material, i will return to this style of promotion in later posts where im interested in researching the truth behind documentary photography.

attached are a few examples of foreign aid websites which include a variety of promotional material. most through the use of potography:

• Britain Helps
• Jersey Overseas Aid
• World Food Programme
• Action Against Hunger

Many of foreign aid organisations use forms of documentary photography to promote the areas which people who donate will be helping. The typical approaches used are to either show traumatic/ emotionally erousing images due to them portraying the true harshness of life or the aftermath of what the help is doing, for example happy smiling children because ‘you’ are helping them to have clean water and survive. Non Government organisations which don’t receive such great amounts of funding tend to use vernacular images to promote their organisation.

Vernacular photography are photographs which are usually taken by amateur photographers who when are attending these aid trips capture ordinary natural images of the communities everyday life.  They focus on common things as subjects and is closely related to found photography. Non government organisations use this form of amateur photography to capture just whatever they are seeing at that present time and then when they return from the aid trip may look through images they gathered at the time and just put them into a website or leaflet to promote what they have been doing. Furthermore the point is that they have gone with no intention to take any photos and maybe this may mean that the photos are more realistic and therefore thruthful as they do not have the purpose of propaganda like professional phtoographers for government organisations may do.

When initially researching the background of the burkina faso freedom organisation i was looking through archival images of photographs which had been taken on previous trips and could notice that the only photographs that were being captured over there of the community and project where vernacular images, most often of the children smiling.

i started thinking about how is this the best way to promote this organisation. The images are plain ordinary images of children seeming happy and smiling. i dont think that they include the powerful message which they possible could. The images are showing the happy state that the community is in due to the project and the compassion project which we are linked to which offer huge amounts of help. However it seems as if they may not need anymore help. i think that they may recieve more funding from people wanting to help if the images where environmental portraits of the area focusing more on specific individuals with straights faces and m,aybe a background which creates a story which shows the individual struggles these family may be going through.

Vernacular images although provide truthful images of this happy community in the leaflet used to promote the Burkina trip, may not always be truthful and representative of the harshness of society over there. This leads me onto looking at the inside outside approach to photography. The approach is simple to understand as it basically means if you’re an inside photographer you are taking pictures of your local area and community and if you are an outside photographer you tend to be photographing in a different country and you are an outsider looking in to photograph these areas. It is known that inside and outside photographers will capture different images maybe portraying different messages. For example, the images taken above have been taken by previous team members, as they are from jersey and do not live in the local area they are capturing photographs of what they see and imagine life to be like out there again linking back to vernacular photography. whereas a photographer from/living in Burkina Faso may capture compleatly contradicting images because they experiences the community, culture and environment in a different way and there images often tell a different story.

Florent Mazzoleni

Florent Mazzoleni, is a local photographer in Burkina Faso, therefore taking the inside approach photographing an area he knows well. Although Mazzoleni focuses on a different type of photography i did find his story and photographs inspiring and they will have an impact on the style of portraits that i take when i go away to Africa. He focuses on documenting the cultural scene of reminiscent.

Florent Mazzoleni captured portrait images of young males and females in his home town, Bobo Dioulasso, one of the largest cities and cultural capital of Burkina Faso. The portrait images he captured where of ordinary people, sometimes family and friends and he used a 20 or 30 rolls of film to produce his staged portraiture. Although he has a different concept and focusing on capturing different cultural and social issues to what i am focusing on with my project about aid trips and the way they help. i still found it interesting to look at and analyse how an inside photographer of Burkina Faso captured images and the way he presented them. What i find most interesting about the portraits above is the amount of planning and sense of placement is involved in the images. the images have been structured and staged to look the way they do. This has the impact of focusing us on only what the subject looks like, what they are wearing and maybe the way they have positioned themselves. We try to create a story in our minds of who that individual is. Whereas so far images i have looked at include background making them environmental portraits as this tells the audience about who we are looking at.

Mazzoleni’s photography has inspired me to consider a different approach whilst i am over there, and i am now considering focusing a shoot around the individuals of the community capturing photographs of them against a plain background, holding a straight face as i feel this makes a successful portrait. i then have the idea to add text to the image. I want to speak to the members of the community i am photographing and find out o=about there life their aspirations, the struggles they may be experiencing in everyday life, as this will add a deep meaning and context to my images.

Furthermore from this research on a photographer from Burkina Faso, the area i am visiting on my aid trip i have started to be influenced on the types of images that i want to capture out there and the deeper meaning of getting pictures with text maybe linking to how they feel the work that we are doing in the community is either benefiting them or harming there community.

A huge conspiracy which has surrounded the thinking and research of many economic specialists is whether foreign aid is actually helping third world countries is mass poverty or whether is it just trying to modernise them to quickly and the fact that government organisations may actually be harming rather than helping. I feltlike this linked into my personal investigation because i am going on a small non government organised trip and i will be able to see the impact that the work that is being done through this charitable work is making slow progress to the community and reducing illiterate rates and decreasing poverty. However it has been argued by the newest winner of the nobel prize in economics that big foreign aid organisations may be having the reverse effects to what small selfless charities are doing. Angus Denton is an economist at Princeton university and has studied poverty in both Indian and south america. His ideas about foreign aid are particularly provocative as he argues that “by trying to help poor people in developing countries, the rich world may actually be corrupting those nations’ governments and slowing their growth.” 

It is understandable that this view has caused mass debate and a lot of upst due to the amount people give to charity and yes it can be argued truthfully that aid organisations have a massively positive impact on the poverty and disease which is causing monstrous death rates in third world countries and have decreased the amount of poverty and death rates due to starvation has decreased aver the last couple of decades. This has been through organisations set up and run by the government installing fresh water, providing vaccinations and in some areas a place to live. However i am interested in Deatons argument as it is a revisionist view and has become increasingly studied. Although he wasnt the first to  economist to challenge assumptions that foreign aid helped, over the past two decades his arguments began to receive great amounts of attention because he was finding secure evidence for his reasoning. Deaton’s skepticism about the benefits of foreign aid grew out of his research, which involved looking in detail at households in the developing world, where he could see the effects of foreign aid intervention.

“I think his understanding of how the world worked at the micro level made him extremely suspicious of these get-rich-quick schemes that some people peddled at the development level,” – Daron Acemoglu

The first lot of evidence for his and others research was the fact that altho the level of foreign aid in africa soared in the 80’s and 90’s the african economies were actually doing worse which isnt what youd expect to see. Economic growth has not been being produced through these aid organisations. A correlation has been made between the increasing rate of foreign aid coming into a country with a lower economic growth. therefore this leads to the question of why this is occurring ad why aid organisation may lead to negative impacts to countries instead of what they are intended to do which is help. Researchers came to a conclusion of why this reverse effect may be occurring; so the idea is that in order to have the funding to run a country, this specific country needs to be collecting taxes from its population. As the people hold the ropes they in some sense have a certain amount of control over the government through the way that if the government dont provide people with the certain services they promise then the people can cut them off/ not give taxes. Deatons main arguement against foreign aid is that it weakens this relationship betweeen the people and government.

“My critique of aid has been more to do with countries where they get an enormous amount of aid relative to everything else that goes on in that country,” Deaton said in an interview with Wonkblog. “For instance, most governments depend on their people for taxes in order to run themselves and provide services to their people. Governments that get all their money from aid don’t have that at all, and I think of that as very corrosive.”

Therefore the genral idea is that if the people are getting the services they require, such as food, clear water, medication, health care and housing from foreign aid they arent going to be paying taxation to the government who weren’t able to provide them with these services. this weakens the relationship and furthermore the economy, leaving these third world countries in a worsened economic state than they originally were. Moreover other arguements have began to appear about the fact that big foreign aid organisations are also modernising third world countries to the point that when the aid leaves them the countries cannot keep up with the moderness as they dont have the resources or funding and are not accomodated to this new modern way of life. This can be seen as distrupting local communities way of life. For example, a foreign aid organisation may visit and poverty stricken area in Africa, provide the children with vaccinations and medication, but what happens when these run out, they don’t have the resources, knowledge or technology to remake medication. Therefore although it is seeming that in promotional adverts these organisations are helping they are giving them the final outcome rather than building communities up to be able to cater for themselves and be independent without further requiring on these charities.

This leads me onto the difference between government organisations and non government organisations. I believe that the area which i am going to, Bobo, has been transformed in a positive way which hasn’t worsened the economy. The money that is raised goes towards the compassion project which educates the communities children and provides them with cooking skills and basic health and hygiene lessons which allows them to reduce the chances of disease. The Burkina Faso freedom project which i am taking part in also aims at building up the community at a low level with basic classrooms, medical centers and toilet blocks which aim to improve their way of life in a slow manor which they can kept up with and will continue to grow at a rate which is right for them.