Ethiopian women sometimes scar their faces as a beauty mark.

As I’ve alluded to in the past 3 posts, my trip to Ethiopia last year was an enlightening one.  Unfortunately, those times of enlightenment came as a result of my mistakes.  For your benefit, let me give you a little bit of a backstory on this one.

I was the leader of a medical and construction mission trip from my church. Our job was to help the Smiths with some building projects as well as help in the clinic.  I was not only in charge of this team, but I was also the photographer, naturally.  So when we were finally on the compound, Allyson highly recommended that I be at the clinic on a particular day to get some good pictures during the infant malnutrition exams.  I agreed to it partially because I like spending as much time in the clinics as possible (per my previous post).  When the day for the exams came, I followed our medical staff to begin seeing patients. Mind you, I had already been at the compound for a few days and had already pulled cars out of a flooded road, photographed a local wedding, almost got mobbed by an entire village because of a hot headed local, attended a local funeral, and been force hand fed with 2 overly large servings of injera and dora wat.  So when I arrived on the scene with the locals sitting around, waiting for our staff to arrive, I felt pretty comfortable with everyone and began just by taking a couple of pictures.  The photo above is the mother of the little baby from my first Ooops post about this trip; this was one of my first pictures at the clinic that day.

Once we started going, I knew where the good pictures were going to be.  The interaction of the nurses with the infants was so emotion filled.  Each mothers’ story was so intricate and intense.  I just kept snapping away at the babies that came through.  Then after a few patients had come and gone, I stopped for a moment and put my camera down.

I looked around to see a lot of blank faces and questioning stares.

After taking pictures of the lady above, I showed her the picture of her beautiful baby and of herself.  We both smiled at each other.  But then she asked me some questions which I couldn’t understand or respond to.  Eventually I realized she was asking me for those pictures.  But I didn’t have a printer with me to give them to her.  After that, I stopped conversing with the people I was taking pictures of because I didn’t want to tell them that I couldn’t give them the pictures.

Not only was I not conversing with the subjects of my photography, I stopped taking pictures of anything but the crying babies because those intrigued me the most.  I wasn’t trying to tell a story; I was just trying to get a good picture.  So when I had a second to look around at these people staring at me, I realized that they probably just thought I was another photographer coming to take pictures and do nothing else.  I was a bystandard.  Simply just a photojournalist that is trying to be that invisible 3rd party.

I eventually just put down my camera and got in the game with the nurses, charting with them, and helping however I could (which wasn’t a ton).  Even though I had literally been knee deep in cow poo water with some of the locals earlier in the week, I still managed to lose sight of why I was there and the people I was trying to serve.

So why do I share this all?  It is possible to follow your passions (medical work, missions, etc. for me), and yet you can fail at telling the story because you’ve lost sight of the real story.  Never hide behind your camera.  Be a part of the story.  That’s when you can tell the story, and, if necessary, use your camera.