A poverty-stricken community. Unsanitary living conditions. Tin roofs and mud-covered streets. Nowhere for the water to drain. And in the midst of all this sadness: children smiling, staring straight into the camera.

As you read this, an image likely forms in your mind. Why? Because it’s one we have seen too often: on the covers of magazines, in the fundraising appeals of international organizations, or even displayed on the walls of galleries (which you'd have to pay a lot of money for to aquire).

These images have become a visual shorthand for suffering, a currency in the global economy of empathy.

There has never been any shame associated with “capturing” destitution. As long as there is a beautiful face, an innocent smile, or a longing gaze anchoring the frame, the world seems content to consume these images without question. Is this a critique or a reckoning on my part? I hope the former, but I know it is the latter.

I was 18 when I first drove around my hometown, in the passenger seat, with my father, headed to one of the many slums the city housed, to try and capture that awful feeling I grew up with. This time, wth my camera. To try and tell a story of unfathomable inequality. I remember photographing this young girl, who was not older than 8 or 9 years, filling up a massive bucket of water. She was filling it from a public drinkable water faucet. Because their slum probably did not have any proper sanitation nor access to drinkable water. I have this shot of her that still haunts me to this day. She has suffering painted all over her face and she is staring at my lens - while the water is running.

Yes, I got a beautiful, chilling series of shots that day. They captured an incredible story of dignity in suffering and a reality no one should experience.

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I also learned a lesson. One I would take with me to this day - as I am still just as enthralled by photography as I was back then.

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The lesson is: Slums and any sort of disadvantaged area where humans are forcefully stripped of dignity are not theaters of curiosity for the privileged to gawk at and document. And yet, they have for a long time now become our favorite paradoxical places to shoot: read the sentence I wrote above and you will understand that we are all part of the problem. I wrote: a story of dignity in suffering. That is what we go looking for: a story of suffering and resilience, of despair and unyielding joy.

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WHat we forget: There is a sacredness in being allowed to witness these lives. Getting to experience these spaces should come with immense gravity. This humbling experience cannot be a passive one - it demands something of you.

These thoughts flood my mind as I spend the morning in Kibera, supposedly “Africa’s largest slum.” I am here, physically present, yet my mind is elsewhere. My senses are overwhelmed. Too many emotions to even name them. The air is thick with the scent of burning charcoal, the rhythm of life like a trance-inducing sound, all around me. I am trying to take it all in. My eyes take everything in, and my brain is ordering me to “capture it” - not with my eyes but with my camera.

I am a photographer, am I not? I am supposed to capture what I see, to bear witness, to document. The kindness, the vulnerability, the unimaginable strength before me creates a time warp, an almost out-of-body experience. But I am too aware of the weight of my lens. I

Brian, the talented photographer behind the “Kibberastories” instragram page and wonderful human, told me “a camera is a weapon”. It is! Or at least that is how it is perceived by so many on our side of the planet: where cameras were the tools of the white settler/traveller who stripped our people of everything, including their dignity. It suffices to look up “colonial photographs of indigenous women” to fully grasp how cameras empowered the colonial gaze for as long as cameras existed.

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own”, Susan Sontag wrote. I do not want to be a tourist here. I do not want to turn this reality into a spectacle, nor do I want to retreat into the convenient distance that photography can create. How do you tell the stories your eyes have witnessed without falling into the trap of the white colonizer?

James Baldwin once warned, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” The history of photography in Africa is one of colonial documentation, of images taken to “other” people who were not white, to showcase the “exotic”, “the poor”, “the look of the babrbar” - and ultimately to justify oppression. Even today, many of the images that flood Western media perpetuate a singular narrative when speaking of certain places in Africa for instance: one of poverty, helplessness, and dependency. The full story is rarely told.

But what does it mean to tell the full story? Does it mean turning the camera away altogether? (Which is what I did in Kibera - frozen by too many questions and a fear of doing things the wrong way). Does it mean to do it the “white way”, the wrong way? Does it mean resisting the instinct to document and instead simply existing in the moment? Or does it mean finding a way to photograph without extracting, without reducing?

As I stand in Kibera, I realize that taking a photograph is not the same as telling a truth. My camera, my gaze through this camera, has the power to distort, to humanize or to exploit. I want my photographs to serve as testimony, not as trophies. I want them to honor. I want them to speak with the people in my frame. I don’t want the “look how joyful they are despite living conditions that no human should ever have to experience”, but I want the joy, because the people in front of me have joy in their eyes.

To resist the easy image, the one that the world already expects, and instead, to seek the ones that honor the dignity of those whose lives are being documented.

And maybe, in the end, to put the camera down altogether, and simply listen. My only photo of Kibera is one taken from the side of the road, before I walked in.

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