Rova, 11, sits for a picture in Ambohimantrika village.
Photograph: Ernest Randriarimalala/WaterAid
Imagine you’ve never had a camera. Never taken a photo in your life. Then someone gives you one, shows you how to use it. What would you choose as a subject?
Your friends, family, your house … flowers in a garden, catching the light – maybe even the odd selfie (go on …). Yup, probably all those – and if you did, you’d have a lot in common with the village children in rural Madagascar who chose exactly those sorts of things to shoot, when given cameras for the first time.
But what about shooting a public toilet, or water tap? Less likely you’d select them as subjects. But they were a hugely popular choice for the kids in one Malagasy village, Tsarafangitra, which is some 70km east of the capital Antananarivo.
And that was hardly surprising, because for those children such mundane objects are wonderful, life-transforming novelties. They were installed as part of a newly completed WaterAid project, to bring clean, piped water and improved sanitation to the area. Thanks to that, people’s health – particularly that of the children, many of whom had suffered from diarrhoea and other debilitating diseases – has improved dramatically. And so has their quality of life. When you no longer have to scramble up and down a steep, muddy path to fetch a bucketful of water three or four times a day, but instead can turn on a tap a few metres from your door, your life takes a distinct turn for the better.
The cameras were part of a WaterAid initiative, run in partnership with Fujifilm, to help children in rural Madagascar bring the realities of their lives into the homes of people living in very different circumstances across the other side of the world. The results are on show in an exhibition – Madagascar in the frame – open in London this month.
Giving cameras to kids was a natural extension of the work of WaterAid’s Voices from the Field officer, Ernest Randriarimalala. For some time now, he’s been visiting communities – both with and without a water supply – photographing daily life. A local man, he takes care to get to know people first, to build a rapport. “When I go into a village for the first time, I just hang around, chatting, letting people know why I’m there and what I’m going to do. And only then do I start taking photos.”
He uses one of Fujifilm’s instax cameras, which allows prints to be made straight from the camera. That means Randriarimalala can give a copy to people he’s photographed immediately – which also helps earn their trust. Last year, WaterAid asked Saraya Cortaville, a leading portrait photographer and Fujifilm ambassador, to accompany Randriarimalala and document his work. “It was lovely to be with another photographer who is part of that community, and is so passionate about helping them,” she says. Some of her work features in the exhibition, along with Randriarimalala’s photos and the children’s own efforts.
Cortaville saw at first-hand how much taking – and having – a photograph can mean to people encountering the medium for the first time. “It was really beautiful to see them using the cameras – how precious and special they thought [the prints were]. We are so blase about images now, that’s something we have lost.”
Teaching children who had never seen, let alone used a camera before, takes a while, but Randriarimalala keeps it simple. “I don’t go through too much technical stuff. I give them the camera, tell them how to switch it on and off, how to take an image, and right away ask them to go and capture something, and we have a look at [the photos] together, and then learn from there.”
Tellingly, he noticed a difference in the speed with which children grasped the basics in a village that had clean water and sanitation and are already experiencing health improvements, compared with one without. “Where they had the water supply, the kids were picking up things very quickly. They listened well, and [it all came] naturally. In the other village, the children took longer to get it.”
The photos themselves can be quite surprising, even to accomplished photographers, says Randriarimalala. “Sometimes I was amazed, because they’d come up with something that, as a photographer [myself], I didn’t expect to get, because they have their own eyes and have their own way of thinking; they have their own way of seeing their own situation.”
Cortaville agrees: “I’ve been a photographer for 20 years, and there was this one kid who took this absolutely beautiful silhouette with a couple of his friends, and next day he looked at the back of my camera and saw I’d taken pretty much exactly the same shot, and he said: ‘Ha! You copied me!’ And I said: ‘Do you know what, I did!’”
So how does this fit with WaterAid’s mission? For Laura Summerton, the organisation’s senior photography officer, it’s all about “making rural Madagascar less of an abstract place, and [instead] showing that people there have the same kinds of joys and sorrows and family relationships as everyone else”. Seeing someone’s photos of their home, their family, a flower outside their door … it all helps “make it real”, she says, “so you identify with that person more. And then you think, ‘Hang on – some of them don’t have a toilet? They don’t even have clean water to drink? Oh, that can’t be right! We need to fix that!’”
To learn more about the work WaterAid does in Madagascar, click here. For dates and details of the exhibition at Fujifilm House of Photography, follow this link.
Since 2012, Fujifilm has donated a total of more than £525,000 to support WaterAid’s work around the globe.
