Development Blogs.com

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At Lincoln Center's Furman Gallery during the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival - June 12-25 read...

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Last week I used aerial photos to show the looting of IDP camps near Goma. Today I located one of the camps on Google Earth. Here’s last week’s photo, overlaid on the satellite image: Aerial view of Mugunga IDP camp (c) UNHCR/Masako Yonekawa 2007 The satellite pictures would have been taken a few months ago - here is what the site looked like then: Spot the difference To see how much further you can take this sort of thing, take a look at the extraordinary Crisis in Darfur project....

A young red squirrel having trouble finding purchase on the flaky bark of a plane tree I’ve been offline a little while, enjoying this sort of thing in the land of the pause-midi: Sunflowers in the Camargue A mallard duck surveys the Canal du Midi...

I am developing an obsession with signs. A year from now, I will roll my eyes at photos I have taken of bright panels indicating what to do, what not to do, which pedestrian demographic to watch out for, which way to flee the city, etc, etc....

A year in the Congo It’s time for a short break. Imagine Kinshasa, the Congo, Central Africa, the tropics. Whatever comes into your mind. Now picture the diametric opposite. What do you see? Antarctica? Japan? Well, I see the Alps. So, things may be a little slow around here for a couple of weeks. If you sign up to the RSS feed, you’ll know as soon as the next post is up. (Or if you prefer email, look for the little yellow icon on the right.) In the meantime, newcomers are invited to check out the editor’s choice of highlights from the archives, and to visit the links page. As for the rest of you, I highly recommend taking a look at what may be the only two Congolese blogs written in English (Diaspora excluded - if I’m wrong about that, please let me know)....

In Kinshasa, services come to you, whether you want them or not. The vendors and touts follow the money, day and night. By day, they line the busier streets, proffering everything from hard-boiled eggs, phone cards and ice cream to live rabbits and malachite kingfishers. Or they sell knowledge, finding what you seek in the market, for an arbitrary commission (quite useful, this). By night, apart from the usual array of seedier services, hustlers gather outside restaurants, bars and clubs, selling cigarettes and guarding cars from imaginary threats. I’ve never seen a rose-seller here, but we do have good old-fashioned photographers. They seem to do OK, although I fear their days are numbered as digital cameras get cheaper, and more and more people take snaps with their phones....

One from the archives: the airport at Addis Ababa Addis Ababa recently hosted the African Union summit. Andrew Heavens was at the airport to photograph dignitaries rolling in from all over the continent. He reports that the Botswanan security guys were the gentlest, the Algerians were the roughest, and that Colonel Gaddafi/Gadhafi/al-Qadhafi had the biggest entourage. Other roadside attractions: Brightening up the favela Bill Sullivan’s turnstile portraits Recordings of William Carlos Williams A review of The Curtain, Milan Kundera’s book about the novel A Sense of Scale, from the smallest meaningful measurement to the furthest known object, and lots in between...

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I have been working on scetches for the MS Uganda Calendar 2007, and after finishing I got somehow carried away with the idea of making postcards illustrating life in northern Uganda. I have been thinking about it for a while - the challenge to present northern Uganda in its true colors, and avoiding the pseudo-romantic style. Besides, most postcards you can buy in Uganda are real crap (bad quality of the photos and the printing). When using photos within MS Uganda, the represen-tation of men and women, geographical areas, religious symbols and colors must be considered. Like if there are too many men, it is a bad signal gender-wise. Using a photo of a yellow bus makes people associate to the Movement (the symbol of the Presidents' party). When I have choosen a photo of a mosque or...

On BBC Africa there is a page called 'Africa in Pictures' where BBC tries to soften up (I guess the cynics would say) or nuance images of Africa. Once also connected to a site called 'Why I love Africa' (which made someone make a site called 'Why I hate Why I love Africa'). Africa is serious business, but Africa is not just poverty, child soldiers, starvation and people dying from AIDS. Unfortunately those are often the images people in the West have of Africa as those are the things we are shown in the media. We tend to forget that Africans have a life in between all this, and do normal things as we do in the West. I like to challenge this stereotype without forgetting the seriousness. See for yourself - take a break and have a look here. This weeks' topic is relaxation, and a some of...