T HE Foreign Correspondents Club's new photography exhibition to be opened on
Tuesday, Feb 28 features color images taken by Cambodian freelancer Darren
Whiteside during his travels through Japan, Vietnam, Somalia and Cambodia.
Whiteside's photographs include Maha Ghosananda's Cambodian peace march,
scenes of rural Vietnam and the pomp of a Japanese christening ceremony.
Curious about scant, emerging reports of an imminent famine on top of a
bloody civil war, Whiteside headed for Somalia, touring refugee camps along the
border before entering the war zone. He photographed nearly all of Somalia, such
as Baidoa. "There was no-one writing about Somalia, everyone was concentrating
on Sarajevo and the Olympics at the time. It wasn't till the Americans attempted
to clean up the mess that the world stood up to take notice," Whiteside said,
still bitter.
Whiteside's Somalia portfolio includes a study of a starving woman among a
crowd of refugees at a feeding station, stretching her arm out holding a small
bowl for food.
"I didn't get into pictures of people dying... but later
there were a lot of photographers who came in for a day or so. They would say
'show us the dead people', take their pictures and run off. The aid workers
hated them."
"There was so much great work being done by ICRC and the
smaller NGOs... they were under incredible pressure, I wanted to capture their
work while the UN were sitting on its arse in Nairobi."
Whiteside, who
arrived in Cambodia before the Paris Accords, says he "fell in love with the
people immediately."
