Since 1993, when I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala, I have been making Latin American women laugh with my inability to make round corn tortillas. I’ve sat beside their stoves, sharing stories, eating warm tortillas with salt and making photographs. For me, it really all happens in the kitchen, which I believe makes being a female photographer an advantage.
This is why when on an international assignment for a client, I opt to eat with and, if possible, stay with a family in the community that I am working in. To really see how a family or community lives, I want to witness and document what the women do in the morning. How early are they up? Who takes the corn to the molina to be ground? Who eats first? Which person gets the one or two eggs available to eat?
The kitchen is where I will find a mesmerizing beam of smoke rising through the roof. After years doing assignment work for development agencies, I have also learned that the number of eggs on the counter is directly correlated to the food security of that house and often the community.
On my assignment earlier this month for The Coffee Trust, I stayed with Maria Raymundo Cruz’s family. The first morning, I was served the only egg they had for breakfast. Despite my desire to stay the rest of the week, I knew my presence put a strain on the food security in the house and so I stayed at a hotel down the road and ate just one meal a day with the Raymundo Cruz family.
Sitting in their dirt-floor kitchen with my expensive camera equipment on my shoulder, made me acutely aware of the economic injustice between my life and theirs. Situations like this make me question what I am doing as a photographer, am I really making a difference or is this a self-serving, ego-driven desire to show what great pictures I can make at the expense of someone else’s poverty and suffering?
This is when my personal mission statement comes in handy. I know that my goal, as a visual storyteller, is to use my skills and my equipment to connect people to one another. I use my camera to show how we are all more alike than we are different. Being a photographer is more than a way for me to earn a paycheck. Being invited into people’s homes and kitchens with my camera is an honor that comes with the responsibility of photographing our shared humanity.
Maria Raymundo Cruz is a mother, grandmother, wife and community leader. She works hard to help her family survive. During the Guatemalan Civil War, she was a teenager and had to run into the forest to escape being killed by the army. She and her family lived hidden in the mountains for 8 years under a plastic tarp. The scar, on her scalp, caused by a grenade, happened when she was 19 years old and pregnant. (For more about Maria’s story, visit me&EVE.)
After two days in the village of Chel, Maria’s 4-year-old granddaughter, Flor, referred to me, in Ixil, as her sister. On my third and final day in the village, Flor stuck to me like my shadow and at the end of the day she crawled up on my lap and fell asleep. This family has so little, but they would have filled my bags with all the coffee I could carry if I let them.
So now what? Will these photographs accomplish anything?
The most direct result is that my client, The Coffee Trust, has tons of compelling visual content of their projects that are truly making a difference in the well-being of the community of Chel. With these photographs The Coffee Trust can pursue additional funding sources, so by 2018, they can complete the projects they have started.
The indirect but lasting impact of being a witness is that my audience can connect with Maria and her family. My greatest hope is that if people around the globe feel connected to one another they will not seek to harm one another or harm the natural resources that we share.
