Nyani Quarmyne (Australia, WK 90-91)
Equity in Action
– Telling Impactful Stories through Photography
Embedded
in the Waterford education is the desire to take education beyond the
classroom. It is to expand opportunities for students, while changing their
approach towards their environment and the role that they can play within their
sphere of influence. “I don’t know if I can pinpoint an exact way that WK
played a role in my career path”, says Nyani (Class of 1991). He does, however,
note a similarity in his area of work and his Waterford experience. “ It’s so
easy, if you live in a homologous environment, to accept at face value the
things you are taught, that you’ve heard and that you see expressed on
television. As soon as you live amongst [different] people,
as
soon as you travel and work amongst them, you realize that those things are
simply not true.”
Becoming
a “Waterfordian”
“My name is Nyani, full stop. I am a photographer,” are the two sentences that Nyani uses to introduce himself. Nyani’s journey to join the Waterford community is one that aligns, quite well, with the life he has created for himself through his career. “I was desperate to escape from the incredibly backward, anachronistic school system in Zimbabwe [in the 80s]”, he says, so when WK English teacher Robin Malan visited Nyani’s secondary school, “that was the beginning of [Nyani’s] connection with Waterford”.
Identity
and Initiation into Photography
While he doesn’t use
the term anymore, Nyani has referred to himself as a “hybridized African” in
the past. Speaking to this term, he notes that “there’s not really any one
place that I come from but I have, to a large extent, had a life that’s across the
African continent and the ‘West’. I sort of exist across those places.” Nyani
has lived in East Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa, Europe, and North
America – calling around 10 countries ‘home’ for a period of time. Photography
further keeps him traveling around the world, typically for half of the year or
more.
Photography was not a
linear path for Nyani, it took him numerous careers to get there. Having
pursued the ‘success’ journey Nyani was “questioning what contribution [he] was
making in the world” when he found himself working for an organization that was
proposing to do things that he found “environmentally unconscionable”. This
point coincided with discovering photography and a transition from consulting
to this area of work. “I almost immediately fell in love with photography and
knew within a couple of weeks that this is what I wanted to do.” Sure enough,
Nyani, his family and their dog picked up and spent a year in North America in
what Nyani calls “a year of reinvention.”
Changing
the Face of equity through photography
Most of the work done
by Nyani is in the domains of development, social justice and humanitarian
issues. As a freelance photographer, he works around the world for a variety of
NGOs, publications and, occasionally, corporations. It is not always about those
themes, however. “Sometimes, I am just drawn to human stories and focus on
those.”
The freelance work he
has done has literally taken Nyani ‘across the world.’ He has captured the
effects of the rising sea levels on Ghana coast, documented life in a refugee
camps in southeastern Mauritania. He continues to tell the stories of the
mentally ill in Ghana and Sierra Leone through photography, where he notes the
link between beliefs and inhumane treatment of the mentally ill. Speaking of images
he made while working on a project about children with disabilities, he voices
out that he “wanted to get away from the clichés of the representation the
African child. I wanted to give back the dignity that is stripped away from
them.”
Nyani has been
intentional about changing the rhetoric of photography by moving away from the
stereotypical representation of societies. He notes, “Photography very much,
because of its history, has often been something that has involved people
coming from one place – often the ‘western world’ – to somewhere else and
portraying things in a way that creates a sense that this place, or this
person, or this way of living is different from ‘ours’.” Thus he tries to
ensure that any work he puts out aims to have a positive impact. “I began
working on things that were not as I wished them to be in the world,” he notes.
He further acknowledges the transitions that have occurred in the process by
addressing the often-misconstrued idea of what is and what isn’t. “I think my
view on the organizations I choose to work with has become more nuanced over
the years. I have learned that things are not always as cut and dried or as
black and white as they seem to be.”
“At the most
fundamental level, photography is a medium that cuts across language,” states Nyani.
He notes that, through photography, he is able to play a role in initiating
communication on the causes he cares about. He adds that, “as empathetic
beings, photography is a medium that allows us to enter – or at least get a
glimpse of – somebody else’s reality, and that hopefully allows us to
experience realities outside of our own immediate one.” Nyani definitely takes
people across realities through the diverse focus of his work. Some of his
favorite projects include work taking Internet access up the Caucasus Mountains
in the Republic of Georgia, and to a remote valley in Kyrgyzstan. “There are so
many places that I relate to experiences,” he says. “For me, it’s the memories
of the things that happen outside the pictures that are a large part of what I
remember about a particular story, or place, or trip.”
Lessons
along the way
“I’d say that I have a
more complex view of my motivations now than I did in the past,” says Nyani. “But
in essence it is still very much about communicating and challenging people to think
about things, and to build bridges.” Nyani notes that there are many facets of the
industry and his approach towards photography that have altered over the years.
“Photography has been shifting and transforming rapidly over the last couple of
decades. That is certainly one challenge. The practicality of, not just finding
work, but finding ways to get meaningful work done, and building relationships
with an organization that one wants to work with is another.” Finally there is
the challenge of “being able to connect emotionally to the issues that you work
on. Sometimes that means grappling with difficult issues and having to question
one’s own relationship to those issues, and deal with how one feels about them.”
Nyani notes that this can be difficult at times, and personal impacts can be a
by-product.
“One of the things that
I am really grateful for, as a photographer, is that my work takes me to places
that I couldn’t otherwise go. That, in many ways, it is a license to enter
places, situations, contexts, and realities that one could otherwise simply not
access.” For Nyani, photography is his process of making sense of – and
understanding – the world. “I have a career that allows me to travel and to be
thrown into different environments, subjects, and themes, all of which you have
to consider, contemplate and understand enough to approach them intelligently.
I am grateful for that.”
In a society where
nationalism and the ‘other’ rhetoric is rife, the work done by Nyani creates a
changing perspective of what it means to exist. This work is reflective of the
role that the Waterford system hopes to play in changing the perspectives of
many outside of our local and international communities. Through the travel
that comes with his work, he never tires of discovering the ways “in which we
are different but the same. In the sense that, while there may be superficial
differences – cultural or dress or religion – fundamentally all humans are the
same. Fundamentally we all have the same wants, needs, and it’s far easier to
find the commonalities between us than the differences.”
< < < Back to other Alumni Profiles
Years
Nationalities
Students
Alumni