ECON-AD 213J | Class 8 Reflection: The photographic politics of slum tourism

Myera with a girl from Khayelitsha.

A Toyota, common in Khayelitsha, parked outside an informal settlement.

Skye Dobson came in class today to talk about her work in Slum Dwellers International (SDI). We visited Khayelitsha, a township mainly composed of low-income housing, to see what a typical day looks like for community organizers. They welcomed us to their community center, where they described the benefits of their savings groups and how it helps them negotiate with local politicians.

After the talk, we walked around the township and surrounding wetlands. Everyone in the class was eager to take photos of the slums and with the children, but something about that idea didn’t sit right with me. It felt strangely exploitative, that I was contributing to the exoticization of the poor, particularly the representations of Africans as lost people who embrace foreigners as dispensers of aid and photographs. This is what Dambisa Moyo warns us in her book Dead Aid as well, and I did not want to add to this narrative. It made me question what made taking photos of slum children attractive in the first place. Does the contrast of their poverty to my wealth humanizing to them? If that were the case, then I feel even worse, because I am in a position where I can witness both poor lifestyles and rich lifestyles, while these communities cannot. It almost felt like the implicit racism in Heart of Darkness that Achebe points out: that I feel a certain kinship with them, albeit distant. In the end, I opted not to take photos with them, unless they invited me first.

Of course, I do not think that my classmates were perpetuating this kind of visual culture, but perhaps it is exactly the kind of unawareness of photography’s wider implications that make such practice so dangerous. At the same time, I wanted nothing more but a photo with them, because they were so happy to see me, and I wanted to capture that moment. It was such a confusing mix of emotions. In some inexplicable way, I felt that I didn’t deserve to take a photo of them because I did not yet earn the dignity of being photographed with them. If I enter development work, I want preserving people their dignity to be the forefront of my motivations.