Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/01

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Re: OT: Shame on you, B.D.
From: "Bob Walkden" <bobwalkden@hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 10:01:40 BST

Hi,

on my first trip to Ethiopia I met a couple of young Ethiopian men on a long 
bus trip and became quite friendly with them. They were very helpful to me 
in various ways. One evening we were chatting after dinner and they told me 
that as young children they had been starving in one of the refugee camps. 
It seems that they were all desperate to be photographed by the ferenji 
journalists because they believed that they would be somehow taken into the 
camera itself, and when the photographer got back to Europe they would be 
released from the camera and they would have a happy, well-fed life of ease 
in Europe.

These 2 men survived and are now fully trained chemists, thanks to their own 
efforts, to the aid that eventually arrived in Ethiopia and to the 
photographers and other journalists who raised our awareness of the problem. 
Those of us who feel moral indignation at all the suffering in the world 
would be more effective if we addressed our concerns to the politicians and 
to the shareholders of the multinationals rather than to the journalists. 
Don't shoot the messenger.

Cheers,

Bob


>From: Dan Cardish <dcardish@microtec.net>
>
>This all reminds me of a photograph I once saw of a starving child laying
>on the ground, surrounded by half a dozen or so photographers, all taking
>photographs of this child.
>
>Dan C.

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