Maybe you're wondering, that's great that he likes taking photos but what does photography have to do with the Kingdom? It's more than just taking photos and writing stories for brochures and newsletters for Missions. It's about bringing equality to people's minds when they see someone unlike themselves.
Below is an article written by a missionary photojournalist, Paul Jeffrey. His words really resonated with John.
Getting Close
By Paul Jeffrey
The war photographer Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” For a photograph to carry emotional impact, Capa believed, the perception of an intimate relationship between the photo’s subject and the viewer was necessary. So taking photos is not something one does from a distance. It’s a close-contact vocation.
With both words and images, I tell stories of how people struggle for dignity, how they fall in love with God, how they make peace, how they laugh when all I want to do is weep. To be able to tell these stories, I get to travel to some far off place and wiggle my way into someone’s life for a moment or a day. It’s a privilege to be given such intimate access to people’s lives. Indeed, it’s often a painful privilege to get as close as Capa suggested. Over the years I’ve had close friends tortured and killed, and I’ve watched hope be dashed over and over again by the powerful forces of death that rule our age.
My ministry as a photographer often involves shooting images of people living through traumatic moments. Whether I’m photographing famine victims or survivors of ethnic cleansing or Pentecostals worshiping, my task is to get close enough to capture some of the emotion and drama that they experience. Hopefully I’m not just a voyeur; I do this because I strongly believe it’s important for people in the global north to understand the harsh reality lived by people in the global south.
The poor usually want their story told, so the task isn’t as hard as one might fear. In Darfur and eastern Chad, for example, those who have survived brutal attacks by Sudanese government-sponsored militias and been herded into miserable camps want the world to know what they have lived through. When I wander through the camps, I am warmly welcomed. Moreover, I am repeatedly overwhelmed by the hospitality the poor offer. That’s true in many violence-ridden corners of our planet. Those who have literally nothing are quick to offer what little they have, a cup of tea or a meager patch of shade, to a pale and sweaty stranger with a camera. Their dignity is a strong dissuasion to think of such people as mere victims, and a challenge to me as a photographer to portray them in a way that accurately reflects their dignity.
In the church, with our long legacy of paternalism, we have been long schooled that the poor are needy and helpless, and it is thus our task to resolve their plight. So we sell misery to raise money. But peddling images of people who appear helpless can be a kind of visual colonialism, both unethical and inaccurate. Most human beings bear an enormous reserve of dignity, even when raped, robed, and chased from their homes and herded into camps where they have to depend on the compassion of others to survive. They are not hopeless objects of our mission, but rather dignified historical subjects, partners with us in making God’s compassion and justice real. That’s good theology. And good theology deserves good images.
With both words and images, I tell stories of how people struggle for dignity, how they fall in love with God, how they make peace, how they laugh when all I want to do is weep. To be able to tell these stories, I get to travel to some far off place and wiggle my way into someone’s life for a moment or a day. It’s a privilege to be given such intimate access to people’s lives. Indeed, it’s often a painful privilege to get as close as Capa suggested. Over the years I’ve had close friends tortured and killed, and I’ve watched hope be dashed over and over again by the powerful forces of death that rule our age.
My ministry as a photographer often involves shooting images of people living through traumatic moments. Whether I’m photographing famine victims or survivors of ethnic cleansing or Pentecostals worshiping, my task is to get close enough to capture some of the emotion and drama that they experience. Hopefully I’m not just a voyeur; I do this because I strongly believe it’s important for people in the global north to understand the harsh reality lived by people in the global south.
The poor usually want their story told, so the task isn’t as hard as one might fear. In Darfur and eastern Chad, for example, those who have survived brutal attacks by Sudanese government-sponsored militias and been herded into miserable camps want the world to know what they have lived through. When I wander through the camps, I am warmly welcomed. Moreover, I am repeatedly overwhelmed by the hospitality the poor offer. That’s true in many violence-ridden corners of our planet. Those who have literally nothing are quick to offer what little they have, a cup of tea or a meager patch of shade, to a pale and sweaty stranger with a camera. Their dignity is a strong dissuasion to think of such people as mere victims, and a challenge to me as a photographer to portray them in a way that accurately reflects their dignity.
In the church, with our long legacy of paternalism, we have been long schooled that the poor are needy and helpless, and it is thus our task to resolve their plight. So we sell misery to raise money. But peddling images of people who appear helpless can be a kind of visual colonialism, both unethical and inaccurate. Most human beings bear an enormous reserve of dignity, even when raped, robed, and chased from their homes and herded into camps where they have to depend on the compassion of others to survive. They are not hopeless objects of our mission, but rather dignified historical subjects, partners with us in making God’s compassion and justice real. That’s good theology. And good theology deserves good images.
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