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.

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.

Slums—disadvantaged areas 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: of suffering and resilience, of despair and unyielding joy. There is a sacredness in being allowed to witness these lives, a gravity to these encounters. 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 also aware of the weight of my lens. I know that, in the wrong hands, a photograph can strip a moment of its dignity just as easily as it can immortalize it.

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 caneras 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. 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, not to invade. I want them to speak with the people in my frame, not about them. 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.

The responsibility, then, is clear: to ensure that the camera is in the hands of the lions. To capture not just suffering, but survival. Not just poverty, but power. To resist the easy image, the one that the world already expects, and instead, to seek the ones that challenge, that complicate, 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.

‍