Photos Not Taken

The route from Cali to Puerto Asís eludes the lens.

Words by Anastasia Austin; Edited by Douwe den Held

The sounds of good-natured competition ring through the air at the community court. At one end, a couple of pre-teen girls shoot hoops; at the other, even younger boys volley a soccer ball. I take a seat on the edge of one of the long concrete stands, which is warm with the Amazon sun.

Mostly the kids are unsupervised, though I share the stands with a few straggling grandparents watching the games, a canoodling couple, and a group of black-clad “goth” teenagers crowded around a phone. Beautiful late afternoon light radiates off all of them. A kid of about ten rides his bike around the perimeter of the field, practicing his wheelies, as if to complete the picture of community bliss.

It’s hard to believe we’re in Puerto Asis – the biggest city in the Colombian department of Putumayo, known primarily for being overrun by armed groups and producing a large chunk of the coca and cocaine in a country that exports most of the world’s supply.

The Border Command (Commando Frontera), the infamous armed group that dominates this area, imposes curfews, restricts civilian movement, recruits children, and generally makes life miserable for the local population. But criminal governance is a weird animal. Dozens of people who live and work here told us the Border Command also imposes order on day-to-day life, banning violence and petty crime from the city streets.

Everyone we speak to in Puerto Asís assures us that it’s safe to walk around in any neighborhood and at any hour of the day. This is a stark departure from most places in Colombia, where you’re bound to hear some variation on: “its dangerous, don’t go there, be careful, stay in at night.”

The city’s infrastructure reflects this ease. Though Puerto Asís is literally dirt-poor — with almost no paved streets — there is a park or cancha on nearly every block. In contrast, locals in many larger Colombian cities, like Medellín, opt for cars, gated communities, and concrete, closed-off shopping centers. Puerto Asís’s dirt roads force motos and cars to slow, allowing kids to safely race around, while adults socialize on their front porches. At night the sound of crickets drowns out the little traffic noise.

At golden hour, that moment before sunset when the light is soft, a photo of the kid doing wheelies around the cancha would capture this nuanced aspect of life here perfectly: communal bliss and playfulness in gang-dominated territory.

So I perch on the edge of the stands, holding my camera bag without taking out the camera. No one gives me a second look, but I am tense, hyper-aware of the threshold crossed the moment the lens appears.

Before leaving on our trip south, I thought of myself exclusively as a writer – a print journalist. But one of our first paid jobs saw me as the photographer on a piece for a glossy English cycling magazine. I had to learn fast.

I soon realized that one of the persistent struggles of photography is just getting up the nerve to take a photo.

The lesson came on only the second day of our trip, near the city of Tunja, Boyacá. Excited to begin capturing rural Colombia on film, I asked a local farmer if I could take his picture. He glowered for a moment, before mumbling “what for?” and walking off.

It’s a fair question—one that’s stayed with me ever since.

As a writer, you can often avoid it, slipping into a place unnoticed. After all, taking notes -- mental or physical -- is less intrusive and less likely to change your subjects’ behavior.

But pointing a lens risks shattering the moment. People get self-conscious or downright suspicious. They stop what they’re doing and either pose or leave. And sometimes, they ask for money.

It is common to see women in traditional dress dragging an alpaca through South America’s most touristy town squares. Travel guides will discourage you from paying them to pose for photos. But, even as such books wane poetic about how doing so would commodify local identity, they acknowledge that photos can be an important source of income for locals. The reality is that these brightly-dressed women are there because other employment options are scarce. They expect to be paid and rightly so.

Being a journalist complicates the decision-making around photography even more. On one hand, you might profit financially from your photos – should the subject not as well? On the other hand, paying for a photo can undermine the integrity of your work. Work that (at least in theory) serves the public in a way a vacation photo doesn’t.

When we reported on security and organized crime, there were clear rules: don’t photograph children, don’t photograph victims’ or witnesses’ faces, never make violence or exploitation appear attractive. And never pay for information or an interview – a rule that extended to photos.

But there are a growing number of photographers who reject this ethical norm. They argue that paying for photographs, even—and perhaps especially—in circumstances of extreme poverty, war, and exploitation can be justified and even morally necessary

Thankfully, Douwe and I have not come up against this dilemma. In our experience so far, people become more tolerant of the lens once we identify ourselves as journalists.

But that raises another question: what is your responsibility to a subject who gives you access? On a trip like ours, are you really a journalist before a publication picks up your pitch?

Moreover, while capturing unfiltered reality is critical in journalistic photography, how many of us want a camera lens sticking into our most unfiltered moments?

As we cycled from the colonial city of Popayán to the archeological site Tierradentro, we got plenty of photos of competing ELN and FARC-EP graffiti. But the SD card is eerily devoid of any people from this part of the trip. Pulling out a camera in such a tense area raises suspicion.

In Tierradentro, we got myriad shots of the pre-Columbian tombs but failed to capture the flavor of small-town drama in San Andrés de Pisimbalá, the small but safe settlement which serves as its main access point.

On our first morning there – a Tuesday – we saw multiple men, not just tipsy or drunk, but wasted around town. One had passed out by the side of the road, another on a bench in town, and a third stood swaying as kids in uniform, let out of school for the afternoon, rushed around him as if he were a bus stop or a pole rather than a person.

These men dominated our conversation as we wandered Tierradentro. Later, while watching a funeral procession for a 49-year-old-man who’d been killed in a car accident, we learned that they were mourning their friend. The whole village turned out to walk the man to his final resting place, leaving us temporarily in charge of the restaurant in which we’d been having lunch.

The loss hit the tiny settlement hard. While many of the men coped by drinking, women united in naked displays of grief: sobbing and holding each other in the church square or gathering to cry in one of its two restaurants.

A more experienced photographer might have attempted to capture these touching scenes of small-town grief – a far more authentic piece of Colombia than our shots of the Tierradentro tombs. But in this small community built around a tourist attraction, whose many hospedajes stand empty because of the surrounding insecurity, people seemed uncomfortable and unnerved by our presence, and I felt too self-conscious and voyeuristic to even try.

Puerto Asís has a completely different energy, though it probably sees even fewer visitors than San Andrés de Pisimbalá. Sitting among its at-ease residents in the afternoon sun, I consider trying to chat one of them up and offering to send them the picture—increasingly my strategy for taking ethical portraits. But everyone around me is so engrossed in their own conversations and activities that approaching them seems disruptive rather than friendly.

This internal debate ends abruptly when the kid doing wheelies on his bike brakes sharply in front of me. “¿Por qué estás aquí?—Why are you here?” he asks. His question holds no animosity, just naked curiosity. I tell him I’m just visiting and he considers this for a moment, before saying “Wanna see me do a wheelie?”

“Sure,” I say. “Can I take a picture?”