Take A Picture, Tell A Story

“I'll take your photo, you tell me a story” sums up the idea behind Robert Gumpert's compelling collection of still images with audio.  You can access the project here. 

The Debt Trap

A series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it happen.

Christ Child House

The boys at Christ Child House, a sort of modern-day orphanage on Detroit's west side, represent just a sliver of Michigan's foster care system and its more than 6,000 legal orphans. As they wait to be reunified with their own families or find new lives with adoptive parents, the boys grow up together sharing tears and tantrums, giggles and hugs, uncertain futures and some surprisingly happy endings.

Common Ground

The last half-century has seen the disappearance of the American family farm, and the grave cultural and environmental impact of the resulting suburban sprawl.  In 14 years of looking and listening, Scott Strazzante sets judgment aside as he explores the evolution of one plot of Illinois farmland, and the people who live their lives there. What results is Common Ground, in which we are given a chance to mourn what is lost, but are also challenged to question the meaning of home.

A New Beginning

Produced by Peter Power and Janice Pinto. Aerial photography by Vincent Laforet.

Wife Of The God

When a God is angry in African traditional religion it is because an ancestor did not make restitution for a crime and the God must be appeased. Amongst the Ewe people of southeast Ghana, female relatives of the ancestor who committed the crime are brought to the shrine to reconcile with the angry God and become fiashidi, which in the Ewe language means, "wife of the god."

Evangelical organizations say the fiashidi are slaves of the shrine and lead an international campaign to liberate and rehabilitate the females. African religion traditionalists consider the fiashidi queens of the town to be holy and believe the liberation campaign is a ploy to eradicate African traditional religion.

There is a growing Evangelical Christian movement through Africa which is erradicating traditional religion. The town of Klikor is an example of a people holding onto the beliefs of their ancestors despite local and international pressure to change.

Dana Romanoff lived in Klikor in search of what it meant to be a wife of the God: are these women slaves to the shrine or queens of the town?

Kingsley's Crossing

In the developed world, illegal immigration is a hotly debated political issue. From the eyes of the world's very poor, it is an excruciating personal decision, made to make life a little bit better for one's self and one's family.

Kingsley is 23 years old, and lives in a two-room house with his parents and seven siblings in a West African coastal village in Cameroon. He is raised with an image of Europe as a kind of promised land: if he can only get there, life for himself and his family will improve.

Photojournalist Olivier Jobard introduces us to Kingsley as he makes the difficult decision to embark on his "mission," and then accompanies him, documenting his perilous journey. Step by step, across desert and ocean, we come to see immigration through one man's eyes, and learn the rewards, and the costs, of such a dream.

Trapped: Mental Illness In America’s Prisons

The continuous withdrawal of mental health funding has turned jails and prisons across the nation into the default mental health facilities.  The system designed for security is now trapped with treating mental illness and the mentally ill are often trapped inside the system with nowhere else to go.

Trapped, by Ackerman Gruber Images, takes us inside the Correctional Psychiatric Treatment Unit of the Kentucky State Reformatory to see how a state is meeting the needs of this growing population.

Finding The Way Home

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people in the costliest and one of the deadliest natural disasters ever to hit the United States. Of the one million homes that were destroyed, over 70 per cent belonged to the poor.

Two years later, some 86,000 displaced families are still living in temporary trailers and mobile homes; federal assistance money promised to homeowners has yet to be distributed. In New Orleans alone, over 77,000 houses have not yet been rebuilt. Houses, jobs, communities all have been lost.

Photojournalist Brenda Ann Kenneally, originally on assignment for The New York Times Magazine, traveled to Louisiana two years after the storm to document the difficult process of returning home. In personal accounts of families' struggles, Kenneally charts the emotional toll of so much loss, and shows what it takes to patch together a new life.

Ivory Wars

Deep in the heart of Africa, Chad's Zakouma National Park is an oasis of sanctuary for the continent's surviving elephants, the last place on earth where more than a thousand can be found in one herd. Protected by armed guards, the park is a gem of abundance and diversity.

Yet just outside its borders, poachers lie in wait for the animals. When the perennial rains arrive, the elephants move toward better forage outside the park's perimeter, and into the poachers' hands. The hunters kill them for their ivory tusks, which fetch high prices on the black market, and leave the carcasses intact, apart from the gaping holes where the tusks once were.

Conservationist/Videographer J Michael Fay and National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols traveled to Zakouma during the wet season in 2006, documenting its wonders and discovering the delicate nature of this rare refuge.

Driftless: Stories From A Family Farm

Once at the center of the U.S. economy, the family farm now drifts at its edges. In Iowa, old-time farmers try to hang on to their way of life, while their young push out to find their futures elsewhere. Click on the image below to hear their stories.

Condition: Critical

Hundreds of thousands of people are on the run, fleeing a war raging in eastern Congo in the provinces of North and South Kivu, and in the northern Oriental province. In both areas the civilian populations have become the victims of an escalating conflict.

People are frightened. Many are sick or wounded. Others have been harassed or raped, or have had everything they own stolen. For more than a decade, several armed groups and the army have been fighting each other. The conflicts in Ituri and Haut Uélé, both in the Oriental province, are less known to the outside world, as the situation is not yet as critical as in the Kivus. But at the same time the violence has made it impossible for people to lead normal lives. Life isn’t just hard in eastern Congo: this region is in critical condition. And things aren’t getting any better. The destiny of everyone in this region is shaped by war and violence. The story of their struggle to survive needs to be told.

Condition: Critical will be regularly updated by Medecens Sans Frontieres over the coming year with new eyewitness accounts, photos and video from the people living through the crisis in eastern Congo.