Shootback: The Keenest Eyes of Africa

If you were in Nairobi's desperately poor neighborhood of Mathare during the mid-1990s, you might have seen a slender American woman wandering around the shanties, where nearly a million people live with minimal water supply amid puddles of raw sewage. The visitor was Lana Wong, a Harvard-educated fine-art photographer, who had come to Mathare with one aim: to teach teenagers how to shoot photographs. "I picked 31 kids, and handed them plastic $30 cameras and a roll of film each," says Wong. "I wanted them to tell their own stories, rather than have me intervene. Most of them had never seen a camera."

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Shootback Exhibition

From that bold idea has come a decade of bold work, some of the best of which will be on exhibit in Paris until May 30 in a show entitled "Shootback," the title Wong gave to her training project. This is not the Kenya of big skies and herds of animals. It is real life, up close as seen by residents of one of Africa's most violent and dire corners. The teenagers — many as young as 13 — had little formal schooling and few future prospects. Most spent their days at the Mathare Youth Sports Association, an activity center which agreed to house Wong's classes. Yet amidst their grim surroundings, the youth captured humor and beauty in their photos. Peter Ndolo, now 21, one of eight children, photographed a boy clutching a bright yellow daisy, which fills almost the entire frame except for a glimpse of zinc-roofed shacks. At 14, Julius Mwelu snapped a bare-chested boy in shimmering boxing shorts flexing his adolescent biceps in front of his rickety home. Hundreds of such photos document both the trials and joys of slum life as viewed through the keen eyes of those who live there. The show offers a refreshing counterpoint to the steady stream of foreign experts who expound on television about Africa's problems.

The intimate style of Shootback's young photographers has endured as they've grown older. During months of Kenya's post-election violence this year, their photographs conveyed an immediacy frequently lost in the news coverage. One of Mwelu's photographs shows flames leaping from the shacks during the fighting, while a pregnant woman races by in blue sandals. And James Njuguna — another of Shootback's original trainees — photographed a Mathare resident challenging a phalanx of riot police, with his camera facing the truncheons dead-on. As powerful as the images are, Shootback's most lasting impact has perhaps been on the lives of the youth Wong first drafted into the project. For many, photography turned from a pastime into an income-earner — a huge advantage in a country with 40% unemployment. Mohammed Dahir Nur, 23, says he met Wong when he was 14, after a broken leg sidelined him from Mathare's youth football teams. "We called her 'Mama Lana' because she turned everybody's life around," he says. "I would not have known what to do in life." He now works as a freelance celebrity photographer in London, where he is studying broadcasting and filmmaking at the University of the Arts. Njuguna is now a news photographer for The Nation newspaper in Nairobi. And Mwelu shoots photographs for United Nations agencies in Kenya. In recent months he has begun his own project, the Mwelu Foundation, to teach photography to a new generation of slum youth. "Photography changed my life," he says.

Despite those big changes, Mwelu says he still shoots images similar to the first photographs he took as a young teenager: "Daily life and good things like people laughing." With the heavy dose of bad news out of Africa, that laughter is rare indeed.