GALO: At one point a crewmember says, “Sorry, culture, it’s not really that important.”

EG: Yeah, Kyalo. Kyalo was very outspoken about that. He couldn’t see the point of any of it; he just thought it was a bunch of rubbish. And, you know, it is fun, the idea of reflection. And the way that you can just continue, it’s sort of like a house of mirrors — you could just keep going. The next experience is what happens when Kenyans watch the film. We see people in Nairobi watching it and they’re very deeply moved by it. And not because we’re great filmmakers or anything like that, it’s just because normally these things just happen and you’re not looking at it happening. And here it is in this film, condensed for them to see how things are changing and it gives everyone a pause. There is this very romantic idea about tribalism, noble roots, ancestry, where people come from, and the old days. There’s a sentimental feeling about all that. I’ve known people to have a melancholy feeling after they’ve seen the film.

GALO: Elizabeth, you said, “After decades of covering war, I learned one thing: my pictures really weren’t helping anyone.” In hindsight, do you think your war photography had any positive impact? Could you explain your decision to move from war photography to the study of peoples in the Great Rift Valley?

EG: First of all, I think photojournalism is a very noble profession and a really important public service, and it should be thought of as a public service. But the thing about it is if you are the person doing it, and you are on the ground with people who are suffering on the scale that the people I met were when I said, “My pictures weren’t helping anyone,” they weren’t helping the people that I met. And you’ve got to really believe in this bigger conversation, this historic value, to push yourself through those circumstances — and be taking pictures of people who are dying — and live with yourself. And I found that there was great confusion, and we mustn’t forget that when I was doing it, America just pulled out of Somalia. Bill Clinton actually created a war there. And what started out as something called “Restoration Hope,” became a full-scale war. So, we had a lot of frustration there. Journalists were taking pictures of the famine and the excitement of seeing a great example of how you can impact change. A couple of months later, Americans were bringing in food, and that was all wonderful — and then it all fell apart. Because it fell apart the way that it did, Clinton was very reluctant to get involved in Rwanda. I mean, everyone was. No one wanted to deal with another problem. So we had then the sadness of watching the entire genocide and photographing that from day one. Not even the U.N. would say that that was happening.

So these were dark times, and times, for me personally, of great confusion. I was also in my 20s — young and inexperienced. And the toll, emotionally, on having been through all that and not really knowing what positive impact it could possibly be having, having no tangible evidence of something like that, left me feeling that I needed to get out. And later, I had the satisfaction of seeing that my photographs were part of that conversation that you describe. They were featured a decade later, when people remembered the genocide 10 years later on the anniversary of that. There were many documentaries made by CNN and different news organizations and I saw my still photographs being used in all of this, and people talking about the truth of what happened and the failure of our great leaders to act. After 10 years, I did finally see that it was not for nothing.

Also, it’s a very dangerous job and I lost many friends. It was very expensive, and I was beginning to run out of reasons to justify it. It was taking a big toll on my personal life and I wasn’t getting the satisfaction of what I thought journalism was supposed to do. At the same time that was happening, the industry itself was really collapsing, I would say. Photojournalism was collapsing. People weren’t reading their news anymore, so the need for still photography was heavily diminished for a very short period of time, once people had really decided that they were going to get their diet of news from 24-hour television like CNN, and later, of course, the Internet. People were running out of money, too. It was very hard to make a living doing it. So it was just coming at me from every possible angle. It just wasn’t viable anymore for me. I thought the best way to handle that for myself was to go out and do something I thought could be meaningful and could have some result. And that, of course, is everything you’ve seen in the film. I liked these small, intimate, personal relationships I had with people on the ground that were moved by being photographed and having pictures to honor their memories. That was a very soft, sweet thing to do after the years that I had spent working as a news photographer.

GALO: There was a consistent theme at the end of the film — the corrosive effect money can have on culture. Elizabeth you said, “If we have to pay people to look at this thing, I feel kind of stupid… I just want to go home.” You referred to what you saw as a “tourist dance,” something you “sought to avoid.” You then said, “You know, in a way this is another truth. This is another reality. And in some ways I think what I did was a fantasy.” Could you explain what you meant by this?

EG: Well, I had sought to avoid all that. I was looking for authentic traditions and I never photographed anything that was staged or put on beyond what would have been natural. There was no ceremony that was created for my benefit or for the benefit of tourists in any of my books. Those are real things. Of course, the flip side of that is: many people come to Kenya eager to meet traditional people, there’s a tourism culture around that, and there are entire villages that exist just to serve the tourism industry. For me, there was falseness in all of that. I wanted to see a real Maasai ceremony — real warriors who were really graduating for their age group. There weren’t tourists at this thing, and it wasn’t being done for anyone but the young men themselves.

But the other reality is this thing that I just now described, and that is more and more what we’re seeing as these traditions fall by the wayside. People don’t really have a reason to wear that adornment and stuff anymore, but if they can make money off of it, they will continue to do so. It encourages a whole other kind of thing. What was reality? If you were to look at my book, would that be the real Africa? Of course not. Africa doesn’t look like that. The truth is made of 1,000 different pieces and the piece that I picked up was this one, little shard of history. But that isn’t really what the continent looks like at all. I don’t think there’s a car or telephone in one of my photos or either of my books. They are not reality. Well, they’re not the greater reality, I should say.

(Interview continued on next page)