I first got to know the American photojournalist Glenna Gordon’s work through a fresh and original series she did on Nigerian weddings. In her photographs, she captured the joy, intensity, and desperation of those events better than I had seen it done before. This year, Gordon has had a number of high-profile assignments, in which she has taken an unusually lyrical approach to photographing some of the biggest stories in the news: the kidnapping of more than two hundred and fifty schoolgirls in Nigeria, ISIS’s brutal execution of Western hostages, and the spread of Ebola. In particular, she has been photographing objects—school uniforms, or a pair of medical gloves—and somehow getting them to express their latent energies and their uncanny ability to divulge more than one would expect. I reached her in Abuja by e-mail to talk about these recent projects.
TEJU COLE: Let’s begin with geography. I’ve followed your work with interest, but sometimes, because of the nature of the material you’re working with, it’s not easy to tell where the photos were made.
GLENNA GORDON: I mainly travel in West Africa, though this summer, for the hostage work, I went to Europe, which was a first for an assignment for me. In the past twelve months, I’ve been to Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal. Some places I’ve been many times. I’ve probably been in and out of Ghana a half dozen or more times; it’s sort of a regional hub or base for me, though I don’t have my own place there.
In terms of where pictures are made, in some ways I like that you can’t always tell. I want my images to be really specific, but to me narrative trumps geography.
COLE: You’ve seen a lot of West Africa. I think you’ve been going there for about five years now. Why West Africa? Right at this moment, it makes sense; but you committed to the region well before the crisis in Mali, before Boko Haram got on international headlines, and well before the current Ebola outbreak. What drew you there?
GORDON: I first went to Liberia in 2009. I’d already been in East Africa, working in Uganda and around there, but in a smaller way, and more as a writer. When I first got to Liberia, I didn’t like it. It felt abrasive. Then, eventually, something changed, and I gave up holding onto the way I thought things were supposed to be. I guess that’s a big part of the appeal to me: the letting go of my idea of how things are supposed to be.
About six months into my time in Liberia, I returned to Uganda for a gig, and was so happy to be back. It was cheap, the weather was nice, the food was good, getting around was easy. But, after a few days, I felt kind of bored. It felt like everyone was just too polite. That was when I was finally O.K. with Liberia.
COLE: Well, West Africans are definitely not too polite, and I daresay Nigerians are the least polite of all.
GORDON: They are most definitely not polite!
COLE: For me, that’s part of what’s wonderful about the region. Those abrasive and confrontational energies are what gave the world Fela, and Nollywood, and the huge contemporary music scene.
I’m curious about how photography became a serious calling for you. Was there anyone whose work you saw who made you say, That’s what I want to do?
GORDON: I really never planned to be a photographer, and I never really planned to work in Africa. In college, I thought I wanted to get a Ph.D. in art history. I liked books with pictures in them. I always took pictures, but not seriously: I spent a lot of hours printing pictures of San Francisco, pictures of leaves, pictures of my friends. I used a darkroom in the architecture building at U.C. Berkeley. I eventually gave up on the idea of the Ph.D., went to journalism school, and, while I was there, took the few photo classes that were offered.
Then I went to Africa. The first trip was to visit my brother, who was working in Rwanda. I moved to Uganda for what I thought would be six months. I wrote and took pictures, but my pictures were almost always better than my writing. In 2009, I made the decision to focus more on photography, because there are only so many hours in a day.
That was also the first year I was in Liberia. Just a few weeks in, I met Tim Hetherington. He had just finished his brilliant book “Long Story Bit by Bit,” which shows his work from the Liberian civil war. He was patient and kind and encouraging. I was fascinated with his book. I’d never seen pictures like these before anywhere. They felt epic and heavy. There was one of the pictures, a photograph of an orange, that seemed to tell the whole story of the war.
COLE: Hetherington really was a remarkable journalist. I had just watched “Restrepo,” his documentary about Afghanistan, and was utterly awed by it. Then the sad news came in of his death in Libya. I can imagine how an encounter with someone like him, with that kind of personal courage and ethical commitment, would really transform your sense of photography.
I feel you are doing some remarkable work yourself right now. An image of yours for Rukmini Callimachi’s extraordinary piece on ISIS hostages showed a “chess set,” improvised from pieces of paper. It was a wonderful picture, because it not only told a strong story but because it also made me realize that you were doing something no one else in photojournalism is doing in quite the same way: you had found a way to photograph the unphotographable. How does one take a photo of an abduction? How does one portray captivity? The work you’ve been doing with objects has been an intriguing answer to these questions. It goes beyond whatever the clichés of war photography are.
But let’s loop back to some work you did earlier in this mode. How did you come to make photos of the objects left behind by the Nigerian girls abducted from Chibok?
GORDON: For the Chibok girls, I knew I wanted to do something that would visually represent their absence. I really didn’t want to photograph the rallies and protests; those images would be more about the protesters than the girls. I realized I could photograph the girls by photographing some of their belongings. The idea was simple, but the execution was not. Getting items from the remote town of Chibok to a photo studio in the capital of Abuja was like moving a mountain.
At first, I was afraid the parents would think I was trying to do some kind of juju with their girls’ things. There’s a combination of suspicion and superstition in this part of the world that I thought I would be up against. In the end, this wasn’t an issue in terms of getting the things, but it was an issue once I had the things in my possession. When I was in the photo studio and moving the dresses around to photograph them, I felt like I was moving ghosts. I realized these objects had immense power. Each item had the distinct smell of the owner, faintly or strongly but recognizably. And the notebooks felt so deeply personal, with their doodles and school lessons and letters to relatives.
I was surprised by how many people told me that my photos helped them see the girls for the very first time, which speaks to the power of objects to tell these stories.
COLE: That was certainly the effect for me when I saw the series in the New York Times. What about the objects Westerners had with them during their captivity by ISIS? How did that project come about?
GORDON: It was a bit of a leap from Chibok to the Al Qaeda and ISIS captivity work. Rukmini Callimachi, the New York Times reporter I worked with, is an old friend. She’d been working on this piece about kidnapping for ages, and I bugged her to let me read a draft, just because I was curious and I often work in kidnapping zones. She obliged, and when I read it I immediately had the idea. I pitched it to the Times, and was sure they’d reject it, or hire six photographers in six countries to do it. No one was more surprised than me when I hopped a red eye to Berlin to work on this project.
I didn’t know exactly what each hostage would have. I was surprised to find out just how many objects people kept. But it makes sense: these things become a part of them, especially in the stripped-down environments of captivity.
COLE: Yes. And, afterward, it’s hard to let the objects go. They’ve become part of life, and part of the story. Such things have always been there, but most photographers take photos of protests or battle scenes or portraits when possible. Given these other, more dynamic options, how did you end up on this singular track as a photographer of objects?
GORDON: I’ve always been interested in narrative, and in the metaphorical power of images. But I’ve struggled with it, too. If you get up in the morning and plan to make a portrait, the path is clear; but if you get up in the morning and you want to make an image with metaphorical weight, the path isn’t so clear.
COLE: You use black backgrounds for most of these images. Why?
GORDON: These images aren’t about context; they’re about the objects. I wanted them to appear a bit ghostly, as if appearing from nowhere and floating in space. The black background makes the images placeless—I can’t go to the cell in Raqqa where the hostages were held, nor can I photograph girls who are missing, and so it stands in for my limitations as a photographer.
COLE: Did you have a sort of philosophical thought that these apparently unspectacular objects could help tell some of the most painful stories of our time?
GORDON: The simple answer is that I didn’t think I was doing that. It was sort of a one-foot-in-front-of-another approach. I had an idea, and I wanted to explore it as much as I could. Suddenly, I knew what I needed to do, and fortunately I had the license to do it.
COLE: Perhaps more than anyone else I know, you’ve been involved in several of the most distressing stories of what has proved to be a very distressing year. Within a few months, you’ve gone from Boko Haram to ISIS to Ebola: How do you stay sane? Looking at some of the worst things humans can suffer, thinking about unphotographable things, how do you avoid sinking into despair?
GORDON: I don’t always stay sane. This has been a very dark year, and I’ve gone to some very dark places working on these stories. The worst moment was when I got back from Europe after doing the hostage work. My thoughts became very cyclical and ruminative: I couldn't stop thinking about torture, captivity and kidnapping, and the trauma that everyone I met had endured. This also led to thinking about every dumb choice I’ve made and every unnecessary risk I’ve taken. I’ve been incredibly, remarkably lucky in my work that—knock on wood—nothing truly terrible has happened to me, despite going to dangerous places. My luck felt undeserved, and I realized how much of this is just chance.
There was also a significant amount of time where I knew about the cell in Raqqa where all these people were being held and most of the world had no idea. Once the stories started trickling out, the weight of that knowledge felt shared in a way that provided a strange sense of relief.
Working on the Chibok girls’ story also took a huge toll. There were a couple of the girls’ uniforms that I carried in my suitcase along with my clothes for nearly two weeks, because of the logistics of returning them to their owners, and I really felt like I was carrying around corpses. At a hotel in Abuja, they wanted me to switch rooms, but I was so tired and worn out that I just started losing it. The manager of the hotel tried to kindly offer to move my things for me, and I was just like, “Don’t touch my stuff!” I had terrible nightmares during this time. The thing about ghosts is that believing in them makes them real. It wasn’t until I finally managed to give the last items back that I had my first good night of sleep.
And then Ebola. That was also just devastating. In many ways, I think I failed as a photographer covering this story. I am happy with some of the images I made, but for the most part I didn’t nail it the way some of my colleagues did. There were several moments where I chose not to take pictures, moments when I chose to stand back and witness rather than to photograph grief; or when I chose to help a sick friend rather than continue with my own work; or to take fewer risks rather than push forward for more gruesome and difficult pictures. Photographically, these were the wrong choices. But, as a person, I’m glad for the choices I made.
COLE: I’m glad, too. We have your pictures, which honor the things you witnessed. What are your next projects?
GORDON: I’d like to continue the hostage still-life work. I’m applying for funding to do this. It’s hard to do, but it also feels important, and that makes it worthwhile. But, other than that, I hope to have a lighter year next year, maybe work in other regions and spend a bit more time in America. I’ll still be back in Nigeria for elections next year, and, other than that, we’ll see.
