Starved for Attention: Photographer Documents Hunger in Djibouti


We all [Doctors Without Borders and the VII photographers] talked about how we can address this issue of malnutrition without touching too much on the clichéd imagery that we'd all seen before. It was a strategy for us to concentrate specifically on certain things in certain countries. In Djibouti, because of the level of frustration there with treating malnutrition, it was a good opportunity for us to focus on the health care providers and find out how this kind of desperate malnourished emergency was playing out. They [the health care workers] couldn't bring it up politically because they might be thrown out of the country by the government if they addressed things on a political level. They couldn't change U.S. policy, and so they just had to deal with the consequences of this inadequate food policy both locally and internationally. And that was desperately frustrating when you're a nurse and you're seeing children die every day and you know that they are dying needlessly.

You're talking about concepts like malnutrition and poverty. How do you go about photographing that?

Well, it's very difficult to photograph. We started with one of the other projects, the project that Antonin [Kratchovil] did in the U.S. We touched on the U.S. food aid policy, the grains that go to the World Food Programme are grains that come from America. They aren't the most nutritious of grains, and the WFP, because of America's aid food policy, is forced to use food that isn't as nutritious as other available food stuffs at a cheaper price. American…agricultural subsidies force American governments to force UN aid agencies to take food products that are not of sufficient quality to do the job they're supposed to, which is feed malnourished kids. It is quite shocking, actually, when you see that on the ground and the kinds of effects that has on the ground.

One of the things you have mentioned is that there is not a war going on in Djibouti, yet children are starving there. A lot of your previous work focuses on war. How did this compare for you?

The Difference was that there's less urgency. It's a constant state, where as in conflict, sometimes it's the matter of a few moments, or a day, or a few hours, where things are happening, this situation in Djibouti it was a constant. It was from four in the morning until four in the morning. It just never stopped. And this crisis after crisis after crisis in the emergency ward, it just never stopped. Kids were just coming in again and again.

Because these issues are so endemic, it can be hard to bring attention to them. What are the plans going forward with "Starved for Attention?"

We are travelling around with it, and trying to take it to areas and events that mean we are not so much preaching to the converted, but educating people along the way. All of the photographers that embarked upon this project learned something quite significant throughout shooting. We're all quite aware and engaged people, and have been working in these areas for quite a long time, and we were all shocked and educated by the situations that we saw. If we can be educated, then I'm sure that we can take that project and educate people around the US and Europe. We're trying to do that by getting it into traditional art galleries and public spaces; spaces where people would normally consume this type of work, or be fed this sort of message.

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