Market Day Portraits
By Jeff James
9 April 2007
High up in the mountainous rainforests of southwest Ethiopia is a muddy little town called Chiri. It's populated by subsistence farmers, a smattering of small shop and bar owners, some government muckety-mucks, and a tiny little NGO called the Chiri Health Center. There is where my wife and I lived for two years, serving as the project directors of the health center, struggling to provide health care and education to some of the world's poorest people.
Living at the health center exposed us to poverty's horrors: wretched, preventable diseases brought on by malnutrition, poor hygiene, and absent education. Despair and sadness seemed to cloak most patients who walked through our gate. Our outreach vaccination trips to nearby villages revealed more of the same. Under the backdrop of torrential rains, ankle-deep mud, disease and premature death, one would think this area and its people hopelessly destitute.
Yet twice each week, thousands of residents trudge through the mud, sometimes for several hours, to congregate in Chiri town. On market days, Thursdays and Sundays, people don their best clothes and boys court girls, offering to carry their heavy bundles of vegetables and grains to and from market. Men sporting fine and feathered hats drink local brew out of colorful plastic cups, laughing, dancing, and listening to crackling music from warped tapes and blown out speakers. Women socialize with other women while trading or selling whatever they are able to produce in a week. Children chase each other through the muddy streets, kicking plastic-bag soccer balls, dodging goats, horses, donkeys and cows tethered to stakes in the ground. Market day reveals a brighter and prouder side of life than the misery that walked through our gates.
The milieu of dilapidated, make-shift structures sinking in the mud camouflaged the true dignity of the people I wished to photograph. I had documented market days time again and never quite captured what I felt to be the essence of the person. The environment seemed to interfere with the story of the individual, changing a proud face or a kind face into the face of another poor person struggling to survive.
Although poverty is an indelible part of daily existence here, my goal was to extract each person from his environment and photograph him on his finest day, in his finest clothes, without the interference of crumbling conditions. In May 2006, I set up a photo booth in the middle of the market and made a portrait of any person who wanted his picture taken. My booth, a white man holding a camera standing in front of a white-sheeted backdrop, was mobbed that day. I photographed street urchins in rags, women in colorful dresses, drunks who stumbled from the bar just to see what the fuss was about, goats and chickens, the town policeman, the village idiot, little boys imitating their best karate kick; distinguished and wise old men (rarities in an area where life expectancy is about 40), young girls in pretty dresses, and more. All told, I photographed nearly seven hundred people. The eleven you see here are some of my favorites. You don't see much in the way of smiles, but I see strength born from hardship, and pride born from ancient traditions. I see hope, perhaps not for earthly rewards, but for a next life with more comforts than this one.
Thanks for letting us know!
Thanks for voicing your concerns. Rest assured, we take it seriously. We'll look into it and take any appropriate action.
