The Bang Bang Club

I woke up today and asked God to help me use this day for good. this one. A few days after my surgery, I knew it would be a down day - an 'you're allowed day,' if you know what I mean.

Woodrow and I went for our walk.  It was a waddle, really, but there was such a great breeze that I wanted to be outside, in it. We paid our respects to the sidewalk and headed home.  I watched an episode of Friday Night Lights, and checked netflix for another film featuring the pants, mr tim riggins.  It led me to the most amazing film and after seeing it was based on a true story on photography in Johannesburg, thought, 'maybe this will be my day.' I hit play.

The Bang Bang Club.  Shot in my beloved South Africa - written about photojournalists capturing the most horrific scenes during Apartheid.  Few of them survived - they often became the crime that they were risking so much to shoot.

It brought back a lot of memories to me and my time spent in that amazing and amazingly confusing place.  It captured the light at sunset - that light is pure magic.  And that was before I was a photographer.

And that was so many years after the 'war.'  And what a war it was. Even in this day. Those things happened as we sat here, going about our lives.  The film was sure to show the ends of the totem poles, and how very little exists between the very poor living, and suffering, in township life and the really rich who live very comfortable lives as long as they succeed in forgetting about those less fortunate oh, all around them.  Things are getting better.  Things are changing.  A middle class is emerging.  Racial hatred is thinning.  But there is a ways to go.

It amazed me how these guys could shoot 6' from somone getting axed to death (all because of their certain tribal blood believed to be in them), and not step in to help.  A little judging came right on out of my mouth. It's like they were standing there in their nice clothes and fancy cameras looking in on a scene that didn't involve them, their people.  So they photographed.  At the time, they didn't realize it was their people, I guess, yet it was - it was their countrymen, their fellow human being. 

I'm sure the minute they would have tried to help, they would have been getting the ax, too.   By photographing, they brought the story to others and tried to stop the fighting with a different weapon. That is what I am telling myself, at least.  I hope things have progressed far enough to where a camera would have been put down and a lifted a hand. There's a line where one man looked up from his killing to the photographer and said, 'stop taking pictures.'  He was told, 'I'll stop when you stop.' 

A holocaust of a southern hemisphere.