It was the year after the fighting in Darfur erupted, in Sudan. I was in the middle of a two-year book project on the country (Sudan: The Land and the People), and I had an assignment from American Vogue to shoot here in Darfur at the refugee camps. What I never saw put across effectively in the media was the size of Darfur, most of it desert, and how this made press coverage of the conflict difficult and not completely satisfying. There was never any on-the-spot reporting of actual fighting, because raids and fighting were rapid and dispersed. There was only, for observers, aftermath, and more than a million displaced people.
This was September, 2004. I was at a camp in a small town, Tawila, in North Darfur, and in one part there was a small crowd of women queuing. They were from the Fur and Zagawa tribes. To be honest, I can’t remember exactly what they were queueing for, because this is one of the main activities in camps for displaced people everywhere – queues for forms and paperwork, food, water, anything. There was a truck nearby and I climbed onto it. The shawl-like dress that includes a head covering, common across all of the north and west of Sudan, is called the tobe, and it is invariably brightly colored. When there’s a group of women anywhere, the effect is striking. As it was here. From where I was, most of the women were faced half away, which made for more color, with heir heads covered. I liked the idea of the frame being filled with color, and used a telephoto. But I waited until one young woman turned. Her skin color was such an intense dark brown, and it keyed the rest of the frame.
The irony is that, as the article on rich and muted colors explains, over on the other page, we naturally associate bright, strong colors with positive things, and muted, restrained colors with a range of less cheerful matters such as drabness, austerity, old-fashionedness, ‘Adding a bit of color’ is generally reckoned to help fix many things, including optimism. Throughout most of Sudan, and it’s a huge country (or rather was until last month when it divided in two), colorful tobes are the norm, and it makes sense, given that so much of the land is drab and dusty. But in terms of peace, conflict, misery and relief efforts, it didn’t mean a thing.
Written by Michael Freeman
www.michaelfreemanphoto.com