As one of Reuters’ photographers in West Africa, Finbarr O’Reilly is not short of assignments, but one week in March he dropped everything to work on his own initiative on a story no other media – be it South African or foreign – wanted to address. One hour away from the wealthy Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, with its swish hotels and villas, a camp of 400 white squatters shows a hidden side of South Africa in marked contrast to the images of black townships we’ve been accustomed to seeing.

Since 1994 and the end of apartheid, the number of white South Africans living under the poverty line has been rising, affecting now more than 450,000 of them. Overlooked and ignored by the rest of the population and their government – “for some they’re getting what they deserve after years oppressing black people, while the white demographic sees them as white trash,” says O’Reilly – 400 of these “squatters” are living in Coronation Park in Krugersdrop. They have been fighting, successfully, against the local council’s decision to evict them to make space for a screening area that was to allow 20,000 fans to watch the World Cup games on giant screens.

“They’ve been living there for seven or eight years,” says O’Reilly. “They live in caravans and tents, and they don’t have access to water and electricity ever since the municipality disconnected them. The population has been told not to hire them, not to feed them, and even, not to treat them when they come to the local hospital.”

O’Reilly spent a week in the camp, working on his own edit before sending it to Reuters for publication. But beyond that, the writer-turned-photographer is developing this project by visiting, later this year, other such camps. “I’m more interested in the reasons why this has happened, what created this environment, and exploring it beyond the issue of racism. I want to change people’s perceptions of South Africa, as I do with other African countries. Yes, there are middle-class South Africans, people that have normal lives, but there are also these people who have nothing.” [Read O'Reilly's full report here]

O’Reilly started his career as a journalist, writing about celebrities for a Canadian newspaper. But, his real interest lied with Africa. He speaks with BJP’s news editor Olivier Laurent about his work and his most recent exhibition “Congo on the Wire”.


BJP: Your work, “Congo on the Wire”, was shown at the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto in May. How did that work come about?

Finbarr O’Reilly: We originally did it last year at the War Correspondent Awards in Bayeux in France. I had been in Congo several times, even before it was on the news agenda. When Congo flared up yet again in 2008, I went back. But there were so many photographers there shooting the same stuff, I tried to shoot in a slightly different way, mainly with portraits, trying to slow things down and taking a softer look at the news. I didn’t feel I had done enough after that assignment had finished. So I returned in February 2009.

Congo is such an amazing place visually, but also for the people and stories you encounter. Reuters let me have complete free reign for a month to do whatever I wanted and go wherever I wanted. That allowed me to have the time to pursue what you can’t pursue in a 24-hour news cycle. This added more in-depth images to the work I had already shot.

The Toronto exhibition combines not just the pictures, but also a historical timeline of Congo and the conflict and also some graphics and information that allow the people to engage on a visual level, but differently from photographs, as well as some audio clips.

On one of the occasion I was in a refugee camp and talking to some people when a gunfight broke out. One of the guys said “come into my tent” and I ended up kind of wrapped up on the ground with him and his child as this gun battle raged for about 45 minutes. I had one of these little digital recorders and put it between us and thought that since we were stuck there, let’s talk, let’s find out who is this guy that invited me into his tent. So we did an interview there, which is kind of an intimate sort of interview with all this ambient noise going around us. We used some clips of that to portray, to the exhibition’s visitors, what it would be like to be in a camp when something like that breaks out.

The whole idea of this exhibition is interaction. Letting the public interact with the images and the information. Congo has had a lot more coverage in recent years, but I think a lot of people still don’t understand the issues. It’s complicated. It’s messy.

BJP: You started as a writer for Reuters. What made you switch to photography?

Finbarr O’Reilly: Initially, I went to Africa as a sort of tourist, as a backpacker in 1994 after university. I had some very compelling experiences there – the Rwanda genocide was unfolding; I ended up working as an elections observer a few months later in South Africa when Mandela was elected. That was the kind of things that made me want to go back to Africa, experiencing the best and the worst of what people can do to each other. I went back to Canada, studied journalism, got a job in Canadian media as an arts writer, doing celebrity stuff. I did that for a couple of years, but I always wanted to go back to Africa. And it was clearly time, so I got in touch with Reuters and they said “actually, we have a job opening in Congo, if you’re interested.”

I went to Congo, worked there for a year and then later took a post in Rwanda, covering the Central Africa region. After writing for a newspaper where you have an audience you can relate to, where you really feel like you have a relationship with your readership, writing for a newswire from the middle of Africa, after 9/11, there was very much a feeling that I was writing into a void, and that while other media were reading your stories, I had no traction with the general public.

And then I went with Rwandan African Union troops in Darfur for a peacekeeping mission there. We didn’t have many pictures of Darfur and I was experimenting with a point-and-shoot camera. I went as a writer, but they said “send as many pictures as you can, we don’t have anything from there.”

Darfur is a very visual place with hugely compelling stories, but like Congo, it’s one of these stories that people may not read an 800-word wire report. It’s probably going to be condensed into a one-paragraph story in the international section of a newspaper.

But the pictures I was taking there were suddenly on the front page of the International Herald Tribune or in The Times’ Pictures of the Year selection. You realise that these distant, forgotten, remote conflicts that I spent my life covering can reach a global audience through photography, because pictures have an ability to provoke an immediate emotional impact on somebody. I realised that if I wanted these stories to reach a wider audience, photography was the way. If a picture is good enough, or if a series of pictures is good enough, than you can actually compelled people to learn more and understand more about a situation or a given place.

That’s when I moved to Dakar to cover West Africa as a photographer. I thought: “Let me just try this photography-thing.” My first assignment was in Togo where they had very violent elections. Six weeks after arriving, I was running into the streets away from a mob that was trying to hack me and another photographer in pieces. Months after that, I was in Niger covering a massive hunger situation. One of the photos I took there ended up winning a World Press Photo prize. When I took that photo, I had been a professional photographer for about three months.

At the time, my bosses at Reuters were looking for a kind of photography that wasn’t typical news-wire photography that could engage people on a slightly different level. Some of the senior editors embraced the idea that I was coming from a very non-photographic, non-news-wire background, looking at Africa in a different way – not black-and-white, not over-dramatised with people being happy too. When you live in a place, it’s not just death and misery. It’s mostly the vibrant life, culture and diversity of daily existence that is humbling and that you actually want to show. It’s part of what Africa is. Reuters really encouraged me, pushed me. They gave me a lot of opportunities and the result has been very rewarding on many levels.

I know a lot of people are depressed and kind of gloomy about the future of photography, but, in a strange way, the news wires and Reuters in particular, because of the news crisis, have become a great place to be at the moment.

BJP: How do you work with Reuters? What amount of freedom do you get?

Finbarr O’Reilly: Because Africa is such a huge place and because we don’t have an Africa editor based in Africa, he relies on us to keep track of what is going on. He has complete faith in myself and the other photographers based in Cape Town. You have a sense of the place; you can have an idea of what may be brewing or what looks like a story but isn’t one. There’s really a freedom to move around and spend good chunks of time in different places. The stories and assignments are self-generated. Obviously, if the Pope or Obama visit Africa, I know I have to cover that, but most of the work is self-generated. We’re not trying to cover everything in Africa, because we can’t. We’re being more selective of the places we want to cover and do more in-depth photography.

BJP: Do you get time to do personal work?

Finbarr O’Reilly: It’s all personal work. When you live in a place, you feel kind of like an activist or campaigner because you’re trying to get the stories out to the rest of the world you think are important, so you really do immerse yourself in the stories. You put your heart and soul into it. There’s nothing really that I keep for myself. I put it all out there. Of course, there are some stories I spend more time on such as the recent one I did about white poverty in South Africa. I approached that story in a different way.

BJP: How is Reuters is promoting your work?

Finbarr O’Reilly: The Toronto exhibition was Reuters’ idea. I think there is an understanding that while there’s a huge benefit in drawing upon the vast pool of photographers Reuters has as a company, some stories or some issues can, on occasions, work well for one photographer who spent a longer time in a place. That happened to be the case for the Toronto exhibition. It’s not always going to be the case, but I think there is an understanding, in a business sense, that within Reuters’ editorial you have Reuters Pictures, which is a huge branding tool. And within that, you have individual photographers that can add to the overall public awareness of Reuters.

BJP: Do you still write?

Finbarr O’Reilly: Yes. Not for the news wire, but if I have a special project, I like to do the writing. I like to work on my own. It allows you to get more trust and intimacy with your subjects. I love writing, so I miss it. So if there’s something that’s really compelling to me, I’ll write the feature. Of course, being with a news agency, if I’m somewhere and news breaks, I will cover it. I’ll call it in. It’s part of the job.

BJP: You’ve also been to Afghanistan…

Finbarr O’Reilly: I’ve been on several embeds in Afghanistan. The first  one was in 2007. At that point I wanted to do it because I felt the focus was still very much on Iraq, but for me the story had always been Afghanistan. I felt I could add something to the conversation. There were pictures there that weren’t being done because everybody was going to Iraq. Now, the attention has shifted to Afghanistan, so everybody is going there. I went last year as well, but it was less rewarding in terms of the pictures I got. I felt they were getting more generic. I due to go next month, so the question is now, what’s the next thing you can do photographically with that story. I have a couple of ideas of things that maybe will work or maybe won’t. That’s the challenge, really.

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