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When people in West Africa want to get your atttention, they hiss. Try it sometime! Just say "TSSSS!!" nice and sharply as someone goes by. It works like a charm. In any case, as a white fellow, and therefore as a walking pile of cash, a walk in town can be a continual parade ofhisses, and I've largely learned to ignore them. So, when I was strolling down the street in Banjul, the Gambia, a couple months ago, I quite happily waltzed through the hisses and continued snapping pictures of a couple pretty old buildings.

Big mistake. It turned out that the hisses were not coming from shopkeepers, but from soldiers. With guns. Who looked angry. I walked over.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" one of them demanded. I explained I was taking a photo of buildings that were pretty. He was not satisfied. "YOU CANNOT DO THAT!". To avoid further trouble, I deleted the photo in front of him, and meekly accepted his angry lecture on how he didn't want to ever, ever again see me taking pictures around the town. Blah, blah.

I left this encounter feeling grumpy. Not so much at the power-tripping soldier (there are plenty of those), but at myself for forgetting a cardinal rule of travel photography: always look around for people in uniform before you take a photo. Finding them doesn't mean you can't take it, but it does mean you should walk up and ask. This can be serious business; I noticed later the reason for the testy soldiers: I was only a couple blocks from the Presidential Palace. Pull the same stunt in Lome, Togo, and the guards are liable to beat you senseless. Even without the nightsticks, the advent of digital photography means that the old solution (ripping the film out of your camera) has been replaced with a unpleasant coin toss between letting you erase the photo and just plain confiscating your camera. With soldiers' incomes as low as they are, I try to avoid giving them this choice.

In any case, taking snapshots in the developing world,and especially in Africa, is bound by a good many rules, formal and informal. The "guys with uniforms" rule is often connected with its broader sibling "thou shalt not photograph government buildings, power plants, bridges, or anything else paranoid leaders might care about". This prohibition is often actually law. Beyond that, though, it's more about norms of behaviour.

Having just posted another batch of photos up on facebook (check em out! Here are the links: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote D'Ivoire) I thought it might be worth talking about why they show what they do. My albums, as much as a like the photos I post, cannot and do not reflect the balance of how things actually look to me here. You'll probably notice a great lack of people in them; that's deliberate. I simply cannot bring myself to take photos of people I don't know. In fact, I think it's rather rude when tourists think that having a fancy SLR camera with a big lens somehow gives them license to jam it into people's faces on the street. Even the sensitive approach, of asking people politely before you photograph them, seems too intrusive for me. The people you see photos of are usually people I've been hanging out with. I'm even a little bit nervous when taking pictures on the street and catching people in them; in plenty of places people are sensitive about this, and I really do want to respect that. The result? Photo albums that can't quite capture the spirit that I find so captivating in West Africa - the pulsing blast of colour and noise and people out in the streets. It's a shame.

Beyond the friendly faces, my albums also avoid showing the poorer sides of the communities I visit, especially in the cities where some of the slums can be fairly horrific. There's something obviously voyeuristic about slum tourism, but there are plenty of times that I haven't been able to take a picture of something I simply consider pretty, architecturally interesting, or unique, because local people have (or would have) objected. In Guinea, this was actually a law; you were not to take pictures of anything that was"damaging to the image of the nation abroad". Applied strictly, that might prohibit any and all photography in settled areas, which are rarely free of squalor. I don't take it that far, but I do try and err on the side both of caution and of respect. It's perfectly reasonable that local people don't want their home portrayed as a dump. It doesn't help that the prevailing aesthetic sense in West Africa doesn't put a whole lot of value on age or heritage. I've had a devil of a time trying to explain to locals just why I might want to photograph a particular crumbling house, or just why I think an old, leaky, tin-roofed Krio shack is particularly charming. I think it's my responsibility here to let their judgments stand.

Finally, sometimes in more touristy areas, running around with a camera seems to be a license for people to demand money from you. Of course, if I were taking a picture of something that was theirs, I wouldn't mind, but in Ghana especially opportunistic young tough guys often decide to try and get me to pay for taking a snap of the street, or the hills (which I doubt they own). In those cases, I just don't bother.

In many ways, these rules are different for photojournalists. To my mind, some trampling of local sensibilities might have to be done for the greater good of getting a story out into the world. But only sometimes. There's no reason that journalists should be exempted from the need to make moral judgments about what they're taking pictures of. For most of us mere mortal tourists, though, the calculation is a lot clearer. Giving our Facebook friends a good picture of African life is by no means worth stepping on anyone's dignity.

Happily, there's a simple solution for those of you who'd like to see West Africa in all its depth: come on over!

Peace
Josh