livebooks blog

Afghan women clad in burqa on a windy day in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photo by Farzana Wahidy

In 1983, I was a photographer for TIME and LIFE magazines. At the time, Afghanistan was occupied by the Russian army and was closed to the media. There were all these refugees, and the terrain was so difficult. My first assignment was in Kabul, and it took me three weeks just to get there on foot, which is only 150 miles from the border. Then I realized immediately how important that story was, and how little the foreign correspondents could  do to cover it. The country is huge — if you have to go on foot, it would take three months to reach the other part of the country. I also realized there would be no media that would accept a correspondent being there for six months on foot to do the story. TIME, CBS, and other media were giving a couple days to a couple weeks maximum.

When I came back from  Afghanistan, I thought to myself, the only way to cover the whole thing would be for Afghans to do it themselves. I thought, so let’s train some photographers. I went to refugee camps, explained my idea, and started training people and giving them cameras. This was all on my own. The following years I went to South Africa, under apartheid. Again, I realized how hard it was for foreign correspondents to cover, because the government was blocking entrance to journalists. So I thought the best way would be to train younger people living in the townships. I began training them, and the whole time I was also covering the story from the inside. It gave me a totally different perspective. Because usually when I went somewhere to cover a story, I was finding myself with the same group of photographers in the same hotels. The local people would be better storytellers.

Photo by Fardin Waezi, another AINA student.

The second thing, which was much deeper, came to my mind later, when I was in refugee camps especially. I realized there are two different destructions in wars. One is material destruction: buildings and bodies. That’s what we photograph. The houses that are destroyed and the people who are suffering the loss of part of their bodies. But the reality of wars and conflicts is that there is another trauma — the destruction of the human soul, of culture, and of human connection. One day, I was reading in a newspaper that there was a shooting in a school in the United States. And what really took my attention was that all the police went to the school immediately, and then the ambulances. Then a group of psychologists was sent because people had been traumatized by this shooting. And that was just one shooting. What are we doing in conflict zones? We are only helping to rebuild the material destruction. But we don’t care about the psychologists that are needed.

In humanitarian efforts, 99 percent are just for buildings. The United Nations and NGO’s help to build schools, roads, wells, and to make the artificial legs. But where is that group of psychologists for countries that have been in conflict for years and years. Where are the psychologists and who can they be? I realized, you can’t send American or French psychologists to talk to Afghans or Cambodians. It has to be from inside. But you also can’t send psychologists to talk to people one-on-one. So I thought maybe the best tools were media and communication tools. If they were used collectively, maybe they could replace these psychologists.

At that moment, I also saw there was no opportunity in these countries for a group of people, journalists or artists, to express themselves. We need to help them to express themselves. We need to train them and give them the tools, which are all the tools we use in the West: cameras, video cameras, and computers. They don’t have access to these. This was one main thing that brought me to Aina.

Tikchik Mountain, Wood-Tikchik State Park ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

The next place this special publishing model I’d developed came into play, and really the place it came into full force, was Bristol Bay in Southwest Alaska. In 1998 there was no mine proposed, no oil proposed, just this huge wild area called Southwest Alaska that is larger than the state of Washington. And it’s the habitat for the richest, most productive salmon fishery in the history of the world, Bristol Bay. And I’m on the board of the Alaska Conservation Foundation (ACF). I’ve been there for seven years. We’re making a big difference. Having a lot of victories. I’m working as a board member, I’m not pushing myself as a photographer, but I’m offering my advice about media.

And the retiring board director says to me, have you ever been out to Southwest Alaska? And I haven’t, so he and his friend, who’s a writer from Wyoming and also an expert fly fisherman, take me out there for a 7-day fly around. And his position as a fisherman is, this is a goldmine for fishermen and conservation, and he thinks I should bring it to ACF, the group I’m on the board of. He is leaving ACF but thinks the Bristol Bay area is going to become an issue in terms of developers wanting it. And I think it sounds like a great idea, and I’m not working on a project, and I’m about to retire from the board.

So I start writing my grants. And I write in the grant that I’ll do a book and it will be about this fishery and its protection, and in funding the grant they can guarantee that 5,000 at-cost copies will be available for the ACF to use in direct mail campaigns to bring more money in. I weave in the grassroots, the foundation strategy, my book strategy, and this advocacy work you can do with direct mail. It was the maturity of all my previous projects coming together. And we went out with that grant, and everyone we showed it to was in. We brought in several smaller family foundations and we brought in one very large foundation, the Turner Foundation. Then, when I was nearly on press with the first book, Rivers of Life, I also noticed I had this extraordinary amount of material specifically about Wood Tikchik Park, which is more than one-third of the water shed. It is the largest state park in Alaska — it’s huge at over a million and a half acres. Just one fishing lodge and everything else wild park.

"Endless Meanders" in Southwest Alaska ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

I talked to one of my friends who was head of department of natural resources for the state, and he said, please do a book on this park and talk about all the inholdings that are at risk. An inholding is an amount of land that was given to a Native American tribal holder as part of his native claims stake when the lands transferred between natives and park. And every person got to extract a certain amount of acreage, I think in 60-acre squares. So they’re all patchworked through these wild lands. And the presumption was the natives would continue to treat them as they had for 3,000 years. But the reality was that parents would be saving them for their kids who would grow up, go to college, and never want to come back to the village, so the traditional values of that land would erode. The parents would look at it and think, well we can sell this to a white guy who wants to build a fishing lodge and we will become millionaires. Among the rest of us there was this feeling of, oh my god, don’t let this happen to these habitats. So with the first book already on press, I began working on a second book with another author, and we wrote the second book directed at these issues of inholdings. So one book was, don’t let this resource be developed by offshore oil and gas or on-shore anything. And the second was, don’t let this land be fragmented by inholdings. Please work with the conservancies and the tribes to see that it all goes into parkland protection.

We took those two books as a set and we did a very substantial mailing and a traveling exhibit. Talk about all these things happening blindly but at the right moment. At the time that we did the mailing, Canada announced plans for Pebble Mine, the largest open-pit gold and copper cyanide-leach mine in the history of the world right in the middle of the biggest part of the fishery. And of course the state leased it. So here’s the two books sitting there and just being mailed and the show’s just going up and they announce the proposal for the Pebble Mine. And then Bush gets Ted Stevens, the Alaska senator now indicted for felony, to pull Bristol Bay off of the no-drill oil moratorium, which it had been on for 18 years, and announced leasing through the Department of the Interior. So immediately the books had more weight.

Among many things that happened because of the momentum the mailing created was a $10 million, three-year grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation flowing to the conservancies in southwest Alaska to purchase and buy into the inholdings when the native villages were willing to strike deals over conservation easements. A 21,000-parcel deal was struck recently with eight or ten very significant tribal elders, which sent out shockwaves in the native community because they don’t really embrace white legal systems. So by those native elders signing on, it has a huge impact at other levels in other tribes. What they did was sell the rights to commercially develop the land. They do not give up their right to own the land. The land is put into an easement that is managed by a conservancy, and the natives can go and use the land any time they want to fish or hunt, but not for commercial development. Even if they sell it, it remains in easement. So it’s a way of putting land into wild status in perpetuity.

Fishtrap Lake And The Headwaters Of The Little Mulchatna River, Lake Clark NP ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

This project was where everything came together in its most mature form, with the Bristol Bay and Wood Tikchik books, the show, and the pre-deemed funding to buy out a portion of the run. The picture books themselves were commercially viable; Aperture sold them in the market. But I would say we got rid of just as many of them in the community by doing direct mail and target-specific sales at lectures and exhibitions. The exhibition has triggered a lot … we took it to all the major cities in Alaska. We triggered discussions between the communities and the mining representatives from Pebble Mine. We’ve had the exhibition go to Washington D.C. as a bi-partisan request from Newt Gingrich and Mark Udall.

In my opinion, the reason some of the projects were so much more successful is, first of all, I enjoy the theater of the advocate role. I’ll go to Washington and lobby directly and use personality. This is an age where cult of personality plays well. You know, James Audubon was an American sophisticate. An intellectual, a researcher. But when he went to England with his drawings of the America birds, he had this fabulous fringe leather suit made for himself and he walked around with his musket. So it’s been theater for a long time. And I’m perfectly happy to play the “outdoor adventurer” Robert Ketchum and show up at Barbara Boxer’s office, especially now that she’s head of the Environment Committee, and ask her to please consider being a co-sponsor to John Kerry’s Bristol Bay Marine Reserve Act. And of course she’s seen the book and all that.

I think if I have had an impact in the book market, it has been to find a way to make the book more useful from an advocate point of view. Perhaps that is a corruption of the coffee table tradition, but so be it, it makes for a much more useful and purposeful publication. I feel like, if these concepts were somehow a secret of mine all these years, they shouldn’t have been, and I didn’t intend it that way. I’m happy to have other photographers think about how to use it. Because a lot of them get frustrated. They get nice books published, they get nice conservation groups all lined up. But then they have a subtle subject like, say, a book on grass prairie, and it doesn’t have a national audience, and it doesn’t really get out there. So it sits and languishes on bookshelves and it gets remaindered. That won’t change anything!

Images of homeless teens by Jay Fram (left) and Martin Schoeller for Do1Thing.org. ©Jay Fram/Do1Thing and ©Martin Schoeller/Do1Thing

Miki Johnson: How did Do1Thing start?

Najlah Hicks: Back in May, 2008, after 25 years out of school, I went back for my master’s degree in multimedia. Do1Thing is actually my master’s thesis at Parson’s. I was planning to create a long-term documentary on what happens to kids who never get adopted.

Pim and I had co-founded the Heart Gallery of New Jersey, where professional photographers take pictures of children in foster care, in hopes that people will be drawn to the pictures and seek out these children and adopt them. We shot about 350 kids in 2005, and in 2007 and 2008 we shot another 100 of what the state calls the “hardest to adopt.” They have lived in foster care the longest, they have multiple siblings, or they are older kids. We were wildly successful. Over 150 of those kids have now been adopted. Today a third of all inquiries for foster care adoption in New Jersey come through the Heart Gallery of New Jersey website.

Then, our last project that we shot, we were seeing that a lot of the kids were older, 15, 16, or 17, who were about to age out of foster care. And there are 25,000 kids nationwide aging out every year, and about 40% end up homeless. That’s where Do1Thing started. That initial idea to document homelessness turned into: We can’t just document it, we have to do something. How about if we do just one thing? And that’s how Do1Thing was born. We launched Do1Thing on February 14, 2009, but it wasn’t just a one-time thing. We are currently working to get official non-profit status, create a traveling gallery, continue to raise awareness, and find funding. So while the fury of our launch is over, that was just the beginning.

Our larger goal is to put together this multimedia, multidisciplinary group that will tackle the big nagging issues that are affecting teens and children. They’ll go in there and come back in a very short time with a comprehensive focus — that’s exactly what we did with this first project. We targeted teen homelessness and within eight weeks we put up a massive amount of quality content documenting teen homelessness around the country. We feel like, there are all these social dilemmas that people just don’t know about, until someone brings them to the forefront.

Another good thing about Do1Thing is that we recognize that we can’t solve the problem alone. We’re not smart enough. We don’t know enough about it. We don’t make the legislation. But what we can do is raise awareness. I hope we change the face of what a lot of people think homelessness is. It’s not fifty-year-old drunks on the side of the street. Today more people are homeless than any other time in history, even the Great Depression. And 1.3 million of them are children.

The results of this first project varied by location. A lot of it depends on how much the local non-profits were working to get the word out. Some worked feverishly — they understand the value of being able to use Do1Thing as a vehicle to spotlight the issues they’re working on. Others are leery because they don’t know us. But the first project was a great success. Our website is now averaging six to eight thousand hits a day. A lot of national homeless associations are linking to us, and asking us to link to them.

MJ: What are you and the Do1Thing volunteers doing on a daily basis now?

NH: We’re editing –- we recieved over 125 gigs of JPGs in 48 hours, which is tens of thousands of images. We have six or seven editors who are editing every day, and we’re adding new content to the site every day. We want to get the word out there, so we’re considering festivals and traveling galleries. Anything that works. We also want to print images for each one of the non-profits that we partner with so that they can have this work on their lobby walls.

Of course identifying sources for funding is a constant process. We would love to be able, five years down the road, to fund independent projects for photographers. Five photographers to work on AIDS; five photographers to work on cancer; five to work on water-borne diseases. To produce great work that will create significant social change, that’s our long-term goal.

Non-profits need this kind of powerful visual content, if they’re going to succeed. For organizations like the Covenant House, 80 percent of their funding comes from direct mail marketing and 80 percent of their donors are over 65 years old. Before Do1Thing, the Covenant House knew very little about social media. They didn’t Twitter. They had a small Facebook crowd. In the 48 hours after the Do1Thing launch, the Covenant House’s YouTube channel was the most-watched non-profit YouTube channel in the world. But they didn’t know about any of that before working with us. They had no concept of blogging, Twittering, Digg, del.icio.us, and all the social networking sites. I think non-profits need to start utilizing those tools and exploring their potential for fundraising.

Do1Thing is not yet a non-profit. We’re applying for non-profit status, and we’re partnering with non-profits, like the Heart Gallery. Right now we’re a project of the Heart Gallery. But it will become its own non-profit, hopefully in the coming months. And then we imagine Do1Thing becoming a kind of consulting agency for non-profits. Again, we’ll shine a light on a cause we believe in. Then we partner with non-profits and take over the multimedia from them. Like with Covenant House, in a very short period of time we can put together a comprehensive multimedia presentation on any social dilemma.

Luz Maria Marin holds the head of her husband Angel Toala one day before he died of stomach cancer in his home in Shushufindi. ©Lou Dematteis

Click below for segments from a recent audio conversation between Lou Dematteis and Michael Costuros, the founder of liveBooks. Lou speaks candidly about the tangible social change produced by the project and how his involvement with the cause continues to nourish his own passion and creativity.

Part 1: How did Amazon organizers initially use your images? “I found out that photographs I had taken that I had passed on for use in Ecuador had been used as part of an education and organizing campaign.”

Part 2: How did the book Crude Reflections come about? “In 2007 we received a Distribution Grant from the Open Society Institute, and that allowed us to print a set of photos and display them back in the Amazon, so the people living this and experiencing this had a chance to see their photos. They were literally in tears.”

Part 3: What effect has the book had in South American communities? “The book is bilingual…we didn’t just want to produce a book we were going to show in the United States. We wanted to make it useful and available to people in Ecuador and Latin America.”

Part 4: How has this project enriched your life? “I’ve developed an incredible bond with many people there. They are very thankful that I’ve helped give a voice to their community. That is tremendously fulfilling to me.”