Close to Home
For Sahat Zia Hero and Yiel Lual Awat, reporting on their situation is a part of their survival. This panel looks at what's to gain when journalism is driven by those directly impacted by the headlines.
by Maya Baylis
How does it change the story when the journalist can’t choose to leave the situation they are reporting from? Our last panel, Partnership Photojournalism, showed how we can not just include the voices of those directly impacted but also ensure they drive the narratives.
“I took this image from the hill above my shelter, and I can see where my shelter used to be”, Sahat Zia Hero displays his stunning photos, one capturing the devastating wildfires that plague the Rohingya refugee settlement in Bangladesh yearly.
Hero created a photography magazine, Rohingyatographer, with a simple goal: “We want people to see us as human beings”. He has inspired his community to pick up cameras and document their hope, dreams, griefs, and sadness.
“People open up more when they see their own neighbours, their own languages, and even their own faces behind the camera,” Yiel Lual Awat, from Kakuma Refugee Camp, explains how, after many jobs being a fixer for foreign journalists, he feels, “they miss the heartbeat of daily life here, and the resilience not just hardships.”
Awat says that by being a resident of Kakuma Camp, he can tell stories more authentically than outsiders reporting, better protecting informed consent and public need. He says foreign journalists often can’t answer a simple but crucial question: how will this help here?
Finally, we hear from Ivy Lahon, Save the Children’s Head of Creative Content and Stories, who emphasised the therapeutic power of the collaborative creation process itself, specifically with children.
We heard how they helped youth in the UK conceptualise and create a film communicating the exhaustion of coping with poverty: “We handed over complete creative control to the kids.”
Photos from Participatory Photography workshops in Egypt for Gazan refugee children moved the room, as we heard video testimony from kids as young as seven about the confidence the camera has provided.
A traditionalist may argue that proximity to what one is reporting brings bias – today, we saw how this proximity brings stories that could not otherwise be captured.
