Wednesday, October 16, 2013 |
Harrowing Photos of the Mentally Ill in Sub-Saharan
Africa
Robin Hammond—Panos
Severely mentally disabled men and
women are shackled and locked away in Juba Central Prison for years on end. The
new nation of South Sudan faces a tremendous challenge to build a modern
country capable of caring for all of its citizens. Juba, Sudan. January 2011.
inShare20
At its most elemental,
photojournalism documents conflict — conflict between individuals, between
nations, between ideologies, between humanity and nature. Literally and
figuratively, photographers capture conflagrations large and small. Some burn
strong and fast; others — often the more frightening, and more destructive —
burn more slowly. They smolder.
Tonight, Robin Hammond,
a New Zealand-born photojournalist, received the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant
in Humanistic Photography for his attention to one of the
sub-Saharan Africa’s slowly burning fires: the plight of the mentally ill.
“Where there is war, famine,
displacement, it is always the most vulnerable who suffer the greatest” says
Hammond. The mentally ill, he notes, are a “voiceless minority condemned to
lives of quiet misery.”
Based in South Africa, Hammond
traveled for two years to regions of severe crisis — eastern Congo, Mogadishu,
northern Uganda, Liberia and South Sudan — photographing in stark detail the
barbaric conditions endured by tens of thousands of Africa’s mentally ill.
Broken, largely forgotten, the mentally ill suffer abominable degradations,
literally chained and caged throughout their days.
Time and time again while working on
his project, Hammond found himself at a loss for words in the face of the
unspeakable.
“I discovered a entire section of
communities abandoned by their governments, forgotten by the aid community,
neglected and abused by entire societies,” he said. “This is not just a
document of what shouldn’t be. This work is my protest.”
