Paris: Retrospective of Kenya photography: ‘It gives them a voice’

The close-up shows a boy of no more than 14 bludgeoned to death, a bloodstained rock next to his head. “This thief was beaten because he stole a TV and radio,” the caption says. “They say a thief’s life-span is about 40 days. He would not have been killed if life in the slum was not so hard.” Read more

Time Magazine: Shootback: The Keenest Eyes of Africa

By VIVIENNE WALT/PARIS. If you were in Nairobi’s desperately poor neighborhood of Mathare during the mid-1990s, you might have seen a slender American woman wandering around the shanties, where nearly a million people live with minimal water supply amid puddles of raw sewage. The visitor was Lana Wong, a Harvard-educated fine-art photographer, who had come to Mathare with one aim: to teach teenagers how to shoot photographs. “I picked 31 kids, and handed them plastic $30 cameras and a roll of film each,” says Wong. “I wanted them to tell their own stories, rather than have me intervene. Most of them had never seen a camera.” Read more