Photo Rapport | Part 2
Rafe H Andrews reflects on the relationships that made possible five of his favorite pictures.
In this recurring series, the DAWNING team presents images with a look behind the scenes at how each shot came together. Here, our Lead Creative Producer, Rafe H Andrews, selects another five photographs that continue to be meaningful to him.
Behind The Great Green Wall
This shot was unexpected. It was taken during our excursion through rural Niger in 2019, for a project called On Whose Land?, a chronicle of a major re-greening initiative in the Sahel called the Great Green Wall. We were traveling between villages and pulled over to the side of the road for a break, when I noticed a herd of goats crossing the road.
Our SUV’s air system had cut out, so we’d been careening through the desert with the windows open, leaving me caked in thick red dust. I was a bit in need of a break, but something Nick, our Director of Photography, always says ran through my head: “The best shots are the ones I missed.” So, I ran over with an interpreter and asked the goatherd if we could speak with him and follow him around.
One thing I like about this shot is the sense of movement –as if you’re walking alongside the young man. There’s a poetry to movement that I always look for through the lens, and I think it happens here.
Poetry aside, our work is also to capture information and story in each frame. You can see here that there isn’t much grass on the ground for the goats to eat, which is part of what this project investigated: the competition for shrinking land resources, the conflict between herders and farmers. That dynamic of scarcity permeated this project from start to finish – I think it’s evident in this photo, and in the herder’s eyes.
Ghosts
This is Jorge Vargas, who was 27 at the time I took this photo. He arrived in New York City at age 15 and was deported 12 years later. We spoke with him as part of a DAWNING project about Mexican migrants who had been deported from New York City, many of whom come from Puebla.
Soon after our plane landed in Puebla, we ran into a problem: a string of last-minute cancellations from deported people we were scheduled to speak with. It was clear to us that people were scared, backing out in part due to the sense of shame that often comes with being deported. So, we switched gears and started knocking on doors across the state.
Eventually, we got a lead about Jorge, leading us to a hilltop home on the outskirts of a remote town. We knocked on his door and he generously agreed to an interview.
During the afternoon that we spent with him and his mother, he spoke about his time in New York, how much he missed living there. As a ten-year New Yorker myself, his deportation story hit me in the gut – the NYC dream can be an equalizer for people from every type of background. But not everyone’s dream works out. Now, Jorge said he would hardly leave his childhood room since returning. He felt more at home in New York than he did in Puebla.
As I was taking photos of him in his room, he turned his head to look at the superhero posters on the wall –the same ones he had as a kid. You don’t see it in-frame, but Spiderman was also there: the ultimate New York superhero, my favorite as well. The Brooklyn Nets insignia on his cap came into view, which hid his face. I decided to leave his face out of the frame and give him that privacy.
There was a sheer white curtain fluttering in the wind, which you see in the right half of the photo; it popped into frame as I clicked the shutter – it feels as if a ghost was passing through.
At DAWNING, we spend a lot of time telling ghost stories. Memories often haunt the people we speak with, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to visualize those memories. This is one instance where we were able to do that.
We’re Doing This
We have total freedom in our work to pursue what we think is interesting, often in far-flung and unexpected places. And while fieldwork is very serious and demanding, we wouldn’t be doing it right if we didn’t manage to have some fun.
For one of our recent projects on the impacts of water scarcity in Kenya, we traveled to Kajiado county, a rural area near the border with Tanzania. We had to do a formal introduction with Maasai leaders in the center of town, where we befriended a fisherman named Charles Mutinga.
I followed Charles down a steep riverbank lined with fig trees, and at the edge of the water, he put together a net and cast it out. Then, he took off his pants, waded into the water, and motioned for me to join.
I kicked off my shoes and got in the water. He began dragging his net across the riverbed – it looked like a dance to hypnotize the fish. He started singing. His expression looks strained, but he’s actually mid-song and joyful – it was a cool moment of a tradesman in action, doing the thing that brings him the most satisfaction.
It was intimate yet beautifully normal. I was lucky to be able to share that with him.
Joel and Dominic
During our project in Kenya, we also spent a lot of time at the Maasai Mara National Reserve, learning about the impacts of drought on the communities there. That lack of water has led to an ongoing shortage of grazing for local herders, who respond by bringing their cattle on the reserve. It’s illegal and dangerous, but they do it anyway because they feel they have no choice.
One evening as we were driving back to base camp, we spotted two Maasai herders with their cattle in the distance. Our driver drove us pretty far off-road to reach them. It was a great bit of teamwork that illuminated a side of the story nobody was talking about.
After chatting with us for a while, they realized their cattle were wandering away, so they abruptly said, “we have to go,” and sprinted off across the savannah. I lingered outside the car for a bit and took this shot.
I smile to myself when I think about these young guys, natural sprinters, unexpectedly bounding away across the grasslands. It felt poetic and transient: their figures look so small against the vast expanse of the savannah and the sweeping sky, as if in the next few seconds they’re going to be swallowed up by it. You can also see their cattle, looking like ants on the horizon.
I feel melancholic when I look back at it. A very fortunate chance encounter that was gone in an instant.
The Offering
This photo was taken inside the ger – a traditional Mongolian tent – of a shaman named Jadamba Soninjargal. She lives in the village of Numrug, in western Mongolia – a place with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Shamans like Jadamba are spiritual leaders for nomadic herders in this part of the country. Numrug had been devastated in recent years by a series of bad winters, and the belief is that by invoking ancestral spirits during a ceremony, shamans can even change the weather, among other wonders.
We had been in the area for weeks for our project Wintering, and heard there was to be a ceremony. After a lot of trust-building, we were allowed to witness it on the condition that we shot digitally, on silent mode, because the shutter sounds could confuse the invoked spirits.
When it was time, all Jadamba’s family and neighbors gathered around her as she chanted and danced, intensely beating a drum until finally merging with her ancestral spirits. At that point, she had become a medium for them to speak through, and everything from her physicality to her voice changed completely. The hair on my neck stood up. The attendees then made offerings, and everyone had an opportunity to ask a question and seek wisdom from the spirits.
There are a few things going on in this photo, and it’s easy to miss the details. In the foreground, there are hands reaching out to make offerings. The object in the air, right above the Dalai Lama, is a cup of vodka milk tea, which Jadamba (or, more accurately, a spirit within her) had rejected and sent flying across the room.
At one point, Jadamba gave me the opportunity to ask a question. I thought about it, and about the work of facing myself as an individual and confronting my own limitations – like a lot of artists I often deal with my own impostor syndrome. It’s common, I guess. So I asked her: “Do I deserve to be here? Am I worthy of being in this tent right now?” I’ll never forget her response: “Yes. Your motivation is true. But always beware of sitting too long on the outside: You can always go deeper.” I think about that a lot, because we begin every project as outsiders, asking to be let in. That day, I was let in.
Article by Elliot Waldman, based on interviews with Rafe H Andrews | Photographs by Rafe H Andrews
© DAWNING All Rights Reserved
Get to Know Us.
We apply the power of social science research, narrative imagination, and the visual arts to understand and explain the most important issues of our time. Through work across Africa, Asia and the Americas, we are constantly exploring, learning and changing.
