Magical Realism in Daily Life with @stephenedwardferry
To see more of Stephen’s striking pictures from Bogota and elsewhere, follow @stephenedwardferry on Instagram.
From a young age, Stephen Ferry (@stephenedwardferry) was well aware not only of photography’s appeal, but of its power.
“I’m pretty lucky because when I was really quite young, 12 or 13 years old, there was a photography store around the corner from my house, and they put up with me,” the 55-year-old photojournalist says. “I went there all the time and they showed me how to develop film and stuff. At the same time, when I was young, the war in Vietnam was a huge issue everywhere. I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there were riots and demonstrations against the war all the time. I learned about all of this through the photographs that came to our house in newspapers and in the pages of LIFE magazine. Those are the same extraordinary pictures that really had an influence on American society. I was already very interested in the news, and that was an occasion where photojournalism showed me that photographs can influence the course of things, and play a role in informing people and exposing terrible things that were taking place.”
While he has traveled to dozens of countries in his career — covering armed conflicts, human rights and the environment — for the past decade and a half Stephen has been living in Colombia. Electing Bogota as a base for his work was a decision driven, paradoxically enough, by what he did not know: namely, how complex and fascinating his adopted country really is.
“I first came here to give a workshop to Latin American photographers in the late 1990s,” Stephen notes. “As it turns out, through their pictures, my colleagues in the workshop taught me a lot about the war that is taking place in Colombia and the human rights situation here. I didn’t really understand the gravity of it and the scale of it back then. I had always worked on issues of human rights, so at that point I decided I wanted to cover the unrest in this country — particularly because there’s this notion that the violence here stems only from issues around drug trafficking. The easy, simplistic idea that people often have is that this is a drug war, but it’s much, much more involved than that. Like so many places, Colombia’s conflict has long and deep historical roots. I set myself the task of trying to convey that, and it turned out to be far more complicated than I ever imagined.”
For someone who has seen much of the worst that human beings can inflict on one another, a strong streak of optimism (colored by, in Stephen’s words, “a lot of sadness”) remains in his approach to his work.
“One of the things that I really want to pursue as a photographer is to keep covering and communicating around the difficult subjects of conflict and violence, but also explore the many aspects of daily life, a kind of magical realist quality to life, that I find so wonderful here in Colombia,” Stephen says.
His profession, meanwhile, demands a certain amount of sacrifice. “I’m a photojournalist,” he says. “Certainly, I obey all the rules of the profession. Never set things up, don’t make false statements in captions, and so forth. But when you’re looking at awful things taking place in front of you, of course you hope that your pictures will wake people up, or will create a sense of concern. And on a few occasions there’s been the satisfaction of knowing that the work has actually helped to cast a strong light on these conflicts, and maybe even made things a little better.”
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