We got ready and showed our home. The visitor thought: you live well. The slum must be inside you.

All too often in our media, the words take us all the way there, but the photographs, habituated to a certain safety, hold back.

For years now, when I cannot sleep, I rise from bed and watch Jacques Derrida talk. I watch what he said sometime in the late 1990s. Each time that I write something, he said, and it feels like I’m advancing into new territory (he demonstrates “advance” with his left hand), somewhere I haven’t been before, and this type of advance often demands

An image depends radically on context, on how it is placed but also on who is looking at it.

“Every life is in many days, day after day,” Joyce wrote in Ulysses,

The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction.

Doran highlighted the political aspect of the play, and this was to the good, for it is still necessary to insist on Africa as a site of political and ideological contest, and not a static place mired in an unchanging anthropological past.

Perhaps their photographs don’t make us think of the photographers’ bravery, the way other conflict pictures do, or urge us to immediate action. We look at them anyway, for the change that they bring about elsewhere: in the core of the sympathetic self. We look at them for the way they cooperate with the imagination, the way they contain what

ekphrastic