Bill Shore’s Letters
Letter From a New York Photo Gallery
Originally published: June 2002
Dear Friend,
Last week I took the train to New York to look at 38 photographs.
They are not famous or popular photographs. They probably never will be. In fact they are 38 photographs that no other person came to see during the time I was there. They are not being bought or sold. Commerce is not their purpose. Conscience is.
I'd read about the pictures in the New York Times. They were taken by Brazilian photojournalist Sebastio Salgado, as part of a campaign called "The End of Polio." Selgado traveled to India, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Congo to tell the polio eradication story. The African backdrops look like places I've been. The dusty road and rubble of brick are familiar. So are the gaunt, deliberate people, and the paradox of reticence and curiosity in their dark eyes.
When I saw the story in the newspaper I wanted to see the pictures for myself. The idea of ending a disease, eradicating it forever, is a powerful one, inspiring but seemingly impossible, not unlike our goal for ending hunger. As with polio, we know the solution to hunger, but given the enormity of the task, and the complex obstacles that block the path, there is a question as to whether we have the will, and the long-term vision to sustain it.
I also saw the direct connection between these photos and the book I'm writing for Random House on how acts of conscience can change the world.
That is the aim of documentary photography. Our eyes are the window to our conscience. What we see becomes a part of us, imprinted on a neuron as surely as if injected into a vein. What is witnessed can't be erased or taken back. When an image we've taken in clashes with our sense of who we are, who we want to be, whether as individuals or society as a whole, it's our conscience that makes itself heard.
The Selgado photos hang on the walls of two small rooms on the second floor of an office building on 23rd street, near Madison Square. The rooms themselves serve as offices for the photography publisher Aperture.
To see all of the photos you have to walk around a few staff working at their desks, and occasionally squeeze past them.
About half of Selgado's 38 photos depict children in various settings receiving a few drops of oral vaccine. In each picture a small child is held in the tight grip of an adult, a dropper poised over their mouth by a health worker. The children are as fearful as if facing a long hypodermic needle. Given the unfamiliarity of the procedure, the parents are too. In one of the pictures, the mother's face twists in a painful, sympathetic grimace, even though her child is only receiving two drops of liquid from a plastic dropper. In other pictures, parents stare piercingly into the lens, betraying a skepticism about cameraman and vaccination alike.
In many of the photos, there are four or five adults surrounding the child. They are there for support, or to hold down arms and legs if necessary, or simply to satisfy their curiosity about such an unusual event. They have scant knowledge of the medicine, but have gathered in awe of that unknowable power that ensures life will triumph over the crippling pain and death they've previously known. That is what they see unleashed with each squeeze of the dropper. Through Selgado's camera, we see it too.
Selgado's photos differ from the traditional documentary imagery that dramatizes despair and provokes outrage. He wanted to emphasize solutions and show that the eradication of polio is within grasp. It was hoped this would generate the energy and commitment for the final push to raise the final $275 million needed to complete the campaign.
The photos in the rest of the exhibition convey just how enormous is the task, and how many unimaginable obstacles must be overcome. They also document the ingenuity brought to bear in far reaches of our planet where it might not be expected.
One picture is of a checkpoint set up on the Congo River where every passing canoe is checked for a child under five. On National Immunization Days in India, no train may leave the station until every child has shown proof of vaccination. In Somalia, the Juba River is the border between two clans, neither of which will accept the vaccine except from their own health workers, and so the refrigerated boxes must be handed off from one group on a raft, to another on shore. For the children of nomads, following their camels through Somalia, one fingers is marked by ink so other health workers will know they received the vaccine.
Now imagine the conversations that must have occurred in the board room as this campaign began to take shape. Surely someone in the room must have raised the concern that the teams would literally have to stop every canoe on the Congo River and check every train in India on a given day to defeat polio. At that moment, this was likely the voice of reason in the room.
When it comes to eradicating such an ancient scourge, good is not good enough. The campaign must be relentless and thorough. If just one child slips between the cracks, just one child on either of two vast continents, it could mean the difference between the on-going agony of the disease, and a world in which it no longer exists except in laboratory test tubes, and photographs.
In 1988, 350,000 children around the world were paralyzed by polio, a high infectious disease for which the world has long had the vaccine to prevent. In 2001 there were just 480 cases. International health groups vaccinated more than 575 million children last year. Polio principally affects children under the age of five. There is no cure, only prevention.
Four doses of oral polio vaccine protect a child for life. It is likely to be the second disease, after smallpox, to face eradication following a sustained global campaign.
Documentary photographs like these do more than make us think. They make us complicit. Once we've seen what the photographer has seen we are left with a choice: do something or do nothing. The pictures are no longer just objects on the walls. They are within us and we carry them wherever we go.
In this way these pictures increase self awareness as much as public awareness. The way we react to them tells us more about who we are. They reinforce that each of us has a choice to make about acting on what we see, and that our first responsibility is just that: to see.
"I hope the person who visits my exhibitions, and the person who comes out, is not quite the same," Selgado explains.
Images lead to action. Some photos cause funds to be raised. Other might lead to Congressional hearings. Eventually public consensus builds, presidents speak, laws are passed. And the world changes.
Our vision of ending hunger is no less ambitious. It is no less complex. But it is every bit as achievable. Not this year, or next, and perhaps not during our lifetime. But when it happens it will be because enough of us worked to create both awareness and wealth, because enough of us took the trouble to see, and because we understood that the role each of us played was critical to the final outcome.
While in New York, I also had the chance to see the next to last performance of "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller, which is about the Salem witch trials as a parable for the McCarthy-era hunt for communists. In writing about his interest in the story, Miller explains: "I felt that as improbable as it might seem, there were moments when an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling." It was true in the 17th century and it is true today. A playwright's pen can enable us to hear, just as a photographer can enable us to see. And organizations like Share Our Strength, with your help, can act.
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