A CREATIVE EYE
AT THE MARGINS
By Amanda Williamson
On a recent trip to Jordan, photojournalist Paul Jeffrey met with a Syrian
refugee whose home was destroyed in last
year’s bombing. Souad Kasem Issa now
lives in a small apartment with her husband and six children in Amman. They
struggle to pay the bills and put food on
the table. Paul wanted to capture the entire family in a photograph, so she agreed
he could come by at mealtime when her
husband was home. They ate on the floor.
Paul learned later that a neighbor had
provided the food because the family was
afraid there would be nothing to eat. “My
photo op became their food op,” he wrote
on his blog, Global Lens.
Paul isn’t just a photojournalist. He’s a United Methodist minister and photographer
for Response, the magazine of
United Methodist Women.
He’s also a missionary in
covenant with Westwood
United Methodist Church. In
photos, he chronicles the stories of real
people facing political unrest, poverty,
hunger or natural disasters, and the work
of the churches whose
members provide relief,
faith and hope. In addition to Jordan, his recent
travels have included
Haiti, Mali, the Sudanese
region of Abyei, and the Roma villages of
Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria.
His work as a photographer comes
with some extraordinary challenges. He
often faces harsh weather conditions,
armed guards and, more often than not,
swarms of children at refugee camps
that follow him everywhere and jump
in front of his lens to get photographed.
In a recent blog post, Paul wrote that to
get images of daily life, and not just the
children, he often shows up at the camps
really early in the morning, before the
little ones awake. Or he comes up with
a dance routine so that the children will
stay behind him, mimicking the moon
walk or Elvis. Or he’ll hand his translator
one of his cameras and sneak off. In a few
cases, he just runs for it.
The children have their moments,
though. Three years ago, Paul wrote,
he was on assignment when some poor
Zimbabwean boys at a South African
church started to ask him some questions. They wanted to know if he knew
Oprah, whether there were dirt roads or
elephants in the United States, and how
much a mountain bike costs.
Paul tried to steer the conversation back to them, comparing their life struggle to how
Mexican migrants are treated
in the United States, when
one asked: “How can you tell
who is a Mexican?”
Paul’s image of those boys
graces the cover of a book released this
year called Sanctuary: How an Inner-City
Church Spilled onto a Sidewalk, the story
of that same church,
which welcomed an
influx of the poor and
marginalized Zimbabwean population in South
Africa’s Johannesburg.
It’s those kinds of stories that Paul
says he seeks out in his travels. “I don’t
report the pronouncements of politicians
and pundits, but rather seek out those
whose voice is often not listened to, who
indeed too often remain voiceless,” he
wrote in his most recent letter to his supporting congregations like ours. “As you
and I try to understand the world around
us, we need to listen more to those at the
margins.”
we need to listen
more to those at
the margins
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