Nick Parisse explains the story behind five of his most treasured images.
In this recurring series, the DAWNING team presents images with a look behind the scenes at how each shot came together. Here, our Director of Photography Nick Parisse selects another five photographs that continue to be meaningful to him.
In 2021, we traveled to Kenya for Pipe Dreams, our investigation into the impacts of water scarcity on the rights of women and girls. In Baringo county, Lake Baringo had recently flooded, displacing residents of nearby villages. Homeless and desperate, many of the displaced women and even some girls had turned to sex work in the nearby city of Marigat. Through interviews with people in the area, we deduced they were part of an extensive sex trafficking ring.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of our driver, Julius Nderitu, we were able to make contact with the head of the outfit, and she arranged for us to speak with one of her employees. We met the young woman at a hotel bar in the center of Marigat.
It was a very sensitive interview. Informed consent is critical in our work. We explained our work for at least 20 minutes, answering all her questions, including the importance of photography in what we do. We built rapport, and she agreed to speak to us under condition of anonymity. She talked to us for a bit over one hour.
Her testimony was devastating. I knew it was difficult, but I didn’t want to leave without a photo. Being able to take her picture required extraordinary care and sensibility. The rest of the team left the room, and I explained to her the different ways in which I could take her picture so that nobody would recognize her. I would take pictures and she would be able to choose the ones that she felt comfortable with, and I would delete the rest, right in front of her. I took different pictures, showing her what I was shooting along the way. She chose this one.
For our Kenya project we also traveled to Turkana, where we met with members of two neighboring tribes that have a long history of communal strife, called the West Pokot and the Tugen. Members of both communities had been suffering from a prolonged drought, and conflicts about water access and cattle theft had become more common as a result, exacerbating tensions between the two sides.
The young man on the right in this photo, Sylvester, had been showing me around his village, telling stories of drought and hardship. He offered to take me to his Catholic church so that I could see it and photograph it. Faith is very important in this community.
When we arrived, the church was closed and we couldn’t enter, so he said: “Well, we’re here at the church, so we can pray outside.” So Sylvester and his friend Casper started to pray while I took photos. I took some photos where you can see the small church behind them, but I liked this one, where all you can see is the arid soil and parched vegetation around them. It was a very private, sacred moment that they let me in on, and I felt honored to be able to witness it. I treasure this memory so much that I keep an enlarged, framed print of it on my wall at home.
This photo is from my very first experience with DAWNING in 2016. We traveled to rural Ghana for a project called 1,000 Days of Hunger, an in-depth look into early child malnutrition and what was being done about it. The young woman pictured here, Mary, had a child who had been born premature and very small due to malnutrition. Her doctor gave her the bottle of glucose that she’s holding, telling her that it’s medicine. She said, “I fed this to my baby, and the baby died.”
I still remember feeling almost a sense of detachment at the time, like my mind needed some time to catch up to what was happening, and the gravity of the situation. Particularly as a rookie, it really messed me up for a few days. I just couldn’t get over the fact that this child had died, probably in agony from hunger, as it was being fed sugar because a doctor didn’t know what they were doing.
Mary told us about how she and her husband buried the child, but they don’t visit the grave because it’s taboo in their culture to visit the graves of children. But she also spoke about how the child had become an ever-present thing between her and her husband–unspoken but there, hanging over their relationship. It’s a story that’s stayed with me since.
The last two photos are from Niger, which we visited a few years ago for a project on the Great Green Wall, a massive re-greening initiative in the Sahel region of Africa. We were driving through Niger, visiting villages at the sites where acacia trees were being planted as part of the project. Many of these villages comprised mostly women and children, as the men had gone off to become migrant laborers.
You see Tassala here, a 50-year old woman whose family had donated barren land for the tree-planting project two decades ago. Recently, she had taken back the donated property to plant peanuts and millet now that the regenerated site was fertile again. This was creating conflict in her community, as the Great Green Wall was supposed to be communal land, without farms.
After our team interviewed her, she took me for a walk around her village and then to her home. She became tired and laid down in her bed, while continuing to allow herself to be photographed. I love the resulting image because it’s a very intimate moment.
Ordinarily, an outsider like me wouldn’t have an opportunity to photograph a Muslim woman at home, in a place like Niger, so to be able to document her home and her life felt like a rare privilege. Tassala was very kind. I love the framing of this shot because it shows more or less the entirety of her life–her clothes, her bed, her cooking pots.
This picture was taken in an informal settlement in Niamey, Niger’s capital, populated by young migrants from some of the villages adjacent to the Great Green Wall that we had visited. One of the goals of the Great Green Wall was to keep young people from migrating. But still many left their rural lives for a better future in the city or abroad. Were these migrants achieving their dream of a better life?
When we arrived at this settlement we realized that it was a scrap metal dump. These young men had built a makeshift community around it to eke out a living. They had become scrappers, scrounging scrap metal and other objects and trying to repurpose or sell them. This was an important moment in our investigation about the impact of the Great Green Wall.
When our team pulled up unannounced, I was a bit anxious about how we were going to be received. The atmosphere was volatile. But as happens so often in our fieldwork, I was pleasantly surprised. The guys were very welcoming and were happy to show us around and explain their livelihoods while I photographed them.
I love this shot because it says so much. The picture is alive. There’s such a strong sense of place, you can almost smell the setting.
Article by Elliot Waldman, based on two interviews with Nick Parisse | Photographs by Nick Parisse | Watercolor sketch of Nick Parisse by Eric Andriantsialonina
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