I am actually working on an essay for peer review about photographs and memory. Part of the essay is about how I turned away from press photography after becoming quite disgusted by the "predatory voyeurism" of taking pictures of other people's suffering during the states of emergency in South Africa between 1985 - 1987.
More recently I visited Guyana where, in the capital, Georgetown (in the La Penitence/Charlestown area) I saw a man, a dog and a cow foraging on a heap of smouldering garbage I raised my camera, caught them in the frame, then could not take the picture... As with writing about the poor, when we photograph poor people we impute our own values of what a poor person is meant to look like, into the image we capture.
Ismail Lagardien
Nihil humani a me alienum puto