I don't travel as a photographer. I've learned over the years to never say I'm a photographer when I enter a country. It is immediate trouble. Sometimes you have to pay thousands of dollars to bring your camera in -- I travel with an old rolofex, and an old beat up light meter, in an old bag, a marsupial bag on my stomach like I've been carrying it for three thousand years and it goes without notice. It looks a little like something out of Road Warrior.
Crossing the borders from one country to another, they being with the games, you go from person to person and everyone wants to be paid off. Sometimes, going through an airport, you're put into a room or just a small shed, and checked three or four times, walking four feet through a curtain, checked again. They are checking for terrorists, checking for hijackers, ones from without and ones from within their own country who are trying to get out. You are constantly meeting these situations where there could be a threat to you. But the worst thing is the threat to the people who live in the country. That's a much more frightening thing, seeing what state these countries are in and seeing what the people need there and how helpless you are to help them.
When I was trying to enter Sudan that was when the American embassy was blown up in Kenya - I had to cancel the first trip there, we couldn't get in. In some countries there are terrorist encampments. There are a variety of political positions to take. Do you go to a country that harbors terrorism? These monuments could cease to exist. So in my life, I have taken the position that unless there is out and out civil war, if I can, I will go to a country. I want to capture these monuments, to create a record.
Almost all the pictures we have of Africa are of starvation, the camps, the murders. There is also this exceptionally beautiful, amazing Africa. That was the point of Henry Louis Gates's project, to give a different view of Africa than that which we get through the media day after day, for the past twenty years or so. There isn't a day since I've returned that I'm not now playing African music in my home, in my car, and thinking about this journey. It really got into me--the way I was treated as a human being, a woman, wandering alone around Africa, a white woman, the help I received, the gestures of friendship, the meals, invitations. I found so much dignity and beauty and majesty, in the architecture, in the people, in the earth there.
Return to Knopf Home.
