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World Photo

CharityIS / Scott Harrison by Frank Lovece Self-taught photographer Scott Harrison took pictures of the poor in Africa, and developed into a new man. Article rating: 7.92

Saul on the road to Damascus, blinded by the light, literally fell off his high horse.

Scott Harrison was on a private plane.

"We would go to Uruguay in January and spend three or four weeks there," says the energetic 31-year-old with a patter as quick as shutter-speed. He's talking about three years back, when he was a modelizing Manhattan party promoter, working two nights a week and getting paid like it was two hundred. "My life looked perfect on the outside," he says, in-between bites of an extremely modest, half-burned omelet at a café on Spring Street, just down from where he lives. "I had most everything I ever wanted -- and I was totally miserable. I saw where it was going and that there would never be enough money, there would never be enough status. I looked around in the back of this private plane, and there were people who had a lot more than I did -- and they were miserable, too. So I wanted to get off the ride."

He ended up trading his ride, actually. The private planes and limos became Mercy Ships and Land Rovers as Harrison, self-taught from Nikon manuals, volunteered as a documentary photographer in West Africa -- e-mailing images of people who were, he once wrote, "afflicted with deformities even Clive Barker hadn't thought of. Enormous, suffocating tumors – cleft lips, faces eaten by bacteria from water-borne diseases." The stronger-stomached among you can view these images at www.mercyglobal.com. Take a warning, however: They are graphic. Fortunately they're also moving and powerful. They have helped galvanize donors and volunteers. And for Scott Harrison, they changed – maybe even saved – his life. We're not kidding: If you think money, luxury and partying are all that, then you've got to wonder why so many people who have it try escape it with enough drugs and alcohol to kill themselves.

Harrison instead had a photographic epiphany. Born in Philadelphia, the son of an electrical engineer who later moved the family to Hunterdon County, New Jersey, he describes the faith and hope led him to form a charity called Charity.

TakeGreatPictures:  You were a nightclub promoter?

Scott Harrison:  I was a nightclub promoter for ten years. I threw fashion parties for a living.

TGP:  Enjoy it?

SH:  Parts of it. I got to the point where at 28, I had everything I wanted:  a beautiful model girlfriend, a BMW, an apartment with a grand piano in New York City. I was miserable. I was living selfishly and arrogantly. Everything was about me. I was selling escapism – I was sponsored to drink a certain kind of vodka, a certain kind of beer. We were surrounded by fashion people, celebrities. It was a façade. A world with no substance or meaning. My job was to sell a lifestyle of escapism from 11 p.m. to 4 in the morning.

TGP:  OK, so say it's career day, and you're describing how you get a job throwing parties and selling escapism from 11 p.m. to 4 in the morning. What kind of background do you need? Let's start with how you grew up.

SH: Really Christian parents. My mother became an invalid when I was 2. She got carbon monoxide blood poisoning and her immune system was irreparably destroyed. I basically grew up with my mom living in a bubble – a tile bathroom covered in tinfoil. She was so hypersensitive that the ink a on a book would make her sick. For her to read, the process I remember as a kid was baking the books to get the scent out, and then we'd wrap the book in cellophane, and she'd wear gloves.

My parents had incredible faith. I was the only child, and I grew up a little resentful. Why is this happening to us? I was a good little Christian till 18, then I rebelled as strongly as one can rebel – I came to New York with a band. We were playing some of the venues pretty seriously, talking with the some of the record labels.

TGP:  What did you play – and between school and helping take care of your mom, when on Earth did you find time to learn how?

SH: I played keyboards. My parents made me play an hour a day. They did their best to make my life as normal as possible.

I was in a band, went to NYU for [a degree in] communications and then got into the nightclub business. The band, Sunday River, sort of fell apart. Our bass player OD'd, but didn't die. We were a bunch of disorganized guys who didn't like each other much anyway.

I started in the nightclub business at 18, while I was with the band. One of the guys who booked us was making a lot of money, and it seemed like something I could do – get people to come to listen to music. I started at [the famous club] Nell's. I teamed up with one of the guys booking our band and we became business partners. I just thought, 'Hey, I can help make your business better. I can help you get more people.'

TGP:  You got your degree in 1998, and were promoting two or three parties a week at clubs like Lotus, The Tunnel, Life, and Halo. Then after 10 years of it … what?

SH: I started re-exploring faith, without the legalism of the church. There's so much stuff that I just didn't like about it growing up. We were Protestant, but sort of non-denominational. What really bothered me about [the church] was the hypocrisy. So I started reading the Bible again. I guess what really attracted me was the idea of service – all these teachings about the poor, and looking out for people who had nothing. And that was exciting to me, because it was the opposite of what I thought. Everything had been about me. I lived selfishly and sycophantically.

TGP: Seriously, don't be too hard on yourself. You were young.

SH: Sure. Sure. But, gosh, going out and serving the poor, that would be something. So I started just exploring faith and service. There's something that struck me, it was a verse in [the Bible's Book of] James [1:27], that said true religion is two things: It's living unpolluted and serving widows and orphans. So I made a commitment that I would do something about it. I would step out in faith and into the unknown for a year. Volunteering at a soup kitchen wouldn't have taken that much out of me, so I would leave everything.  I'd always been interested in extremes. Being a nightclub promoter is a pretty bizarre thing to do, getting thousands of people together and selling 'em expensive cocktails. So I was really interested in the other extreme, which would be serving the poor in the poorest country in the world. At that time it was [the West African democratic republic] Liberia, coming out of 14 years of civil war.  [The First Liberian Civil War ran from 1989 to 1996, and the Second Liberian Civil War from 1999 to 2003]. They were off the UN development charts: No electricity, no public running water, no sewage, and no mail in the country.

So I had to figure out how to do that. So you Google, like, "volunteer for a year in Africa"! (laughs) And I was grossly underqualified for just about every job I could find. I mean, they wanted 10 years of "Sudan interior-country liaison experience." And y'know, I know how to throw a good party and get paid for it! So I stumbled upon Mercy Ships, which needed a photographer for a year to document the work of 350 surgeons, dentists, doctors, well-builders and community-builders. I'm not a professional photographer but I applied anyway, and threw some picture up online of buildings and my dog. I always took good pictures, so I had total confidence in my ability to do this.

I think they probably had reservations about taking a nightclub promoter, so I didn't hear from them for a while. And then I was in the south of France, really just waiting it out – I really had almost all my eggs in one basket with Mercy Ships. It felt right. And they called! A few months later they said, 'Hey, we've got an opportunity. We'll meet you.' They didn't agree just to take me on – they said they wanted to meet me first. The ship was in Germany at the time, so I went up to Germany and convinced them I wasn't crazy and wasn't gonna throw wild parties on the ship, and they took me on. And I was in Africa like two weeks later.

TGP: How'd you get on with them?

SH: I hit it off with everyone. But they definitely took a chance on me. I did have to pay $500 a month to be on the ship, like everyone else. All the volunteers, you don't just volunteer, you give them about six grand a year, plus [you pay for] all your flights [to get to the ship].

TGP: Well, I guess I won't see you on the next ship. So: What's the first thing you shot once you got there?

SH:  On my third day I took a picture of five or seven thousand people standing in a field, each of them with tumors or cleft lips or blind or lame, with parasites and worms, flesh-eating disease, all this stuff I had no paradigm for.

TGP: I found it really, really hard to look at the pictures you took. Had a really unexpected rush of … just horror and sadness. What was your own first reaction to seeing these villagers right there in front of you?

SH:  I just started crying. I just lost it. The first kid I came face to face with was a kid called Alfred, and he just had a huge tumor and I didn't even know what it was. And the doctors, they love it. They come for their vacation – two weeks a year, they'll come with the family, and just operate. They wake up at 6:30, 7 a.m., they just operate until 6, 7 o'clock at night.

TGP: Poverty there is different from even being homeless here.

SH:  That's exactly right. One billion people on the planet don't have access to clean water. Two-and-a-half billion people don't have access to a toilet. A homeless person in New York City has access to both in a bunch of parks. And I'm asked that a lot, "What about the poor at home?" I completely support any and all charities helping the poor in our country. But the extreme poverty that I saw, there's no comparison for it. It's another world. People drinking mud, because that's all they have.

TGP: How long you were you there, and what photo equipment did you bring?

SH:  I spent eight months – four months in Benin and then four months in Liberia. I took about 50,000 photos. I had two Nikon D1X [digital cameras]. And I did absolutely have to read the manual. I'd never shot digital SLR, or anything so I was, like, terrified! (laughs). I was reading the Magic Lantern Guides to these things! But it was OK, and the photos got better. I was really just trying to use the camera to tell stories and document things. And I got to fly in helicopters with doctors to remote places of the country, and take canoes an hour into villages where there were no roads, going along on dental screenings. An amazing experience, seeing everything I could see and learning everything I could learn.

TGP: What happened after that?

SH:  The ship was going on hiatus to be re-provisioned, so I flew back in to New York and two hours later I was on the roof of the Soho House [hotel and private club] having a $16 Margarita with some friends – my old world.

TGP: What'd your friends think about all this?

SH:  I was told that when you come back, people don't care, they don't wanna listen, they don't wanna hear your stories about Africa. And that's not me: These people were gonna listen whether they wanted to or not! (chuckles). And I'd already been blasting people with all these images from my little office in Liberia. So I come back, I have a $16 cocktail, and I find myself with a group of friends talking about how $16 in Liberia can feed four people for a month. It's a bag of rice. And everybody was listening. Perhaps because they knew me before or perhaps because they truly were interested.  But I had an audience. And in a few minutes, the laptop was out, I'm showing pictures, it became very clear this was what I was gonna do.

So I had all these photos. I couldn't sell them, as photographers do, because of the subject matter. So I did this exposition. I convinced [Manhattan's] Metropolitan Pavilion gallery to give us $75,000 of space for free and in August 2005 I put a [10-day] show called "Mercy" together. It was about a hundred images and videos of these patients' stories. We led people through Liberia and educated them about the country and the war, and then told the stories, which I thought were incredibly inspiring because these people are saved in the end.

TGP: Was this just for education or awareness, or did the images help raise money for the African villages?

SH: During the 10 days, $96,000 was raised.  People came, they were moved, and they were able to donate directly to a charity. That’s where we got the idea to sell water to build wells, too. One of my club friends said, "Hey, let's do a $20 bottle of spring water." It was an installation, and people would donate $20 and take a bottle. It was symbolic.  That really worked, and we sold enough water to build 5 wells in Liberia, to transform five villages.

TGP: So all this got you thinking….

SH:  Another six months, and that's where [the organization] Charity started, really.

TGP: What did you want Charity to do, exactly?

SH: Educational exhibitions, using photographs and video to stimulate a greater awareness about extreme poverty, to inspire people to think differently, and then to act and to give. And once [a piece of] work's done, we would get out there with cameras and show people what the money did.

TGP: Describe a typical well.

SH: It's a hole a hundred to 350 feet down, costs between 4 and 10 thousand dollars, and just uses a simple hand pump. There's a concrete base. It brings up about a million gallons per year of clean water.  The pump costs 500 bucks, the rest is the cost of goods like concrete, chlorine and fuel.

TGP: Is finding water expensive to do?

SH: Another irony is that in some of these countries there's an abundance of groundwater, of aquifers. But they don't have the resources to tap into that.

TGP: What is, say, the Liberian government doing about all this? It's not technically difficult to build a well. Why aren't they doing it?

SH: In Liberia, they just came out of 14 years of brutal civil war where a third of the country was displaced in camps, one out of three million people. And about 250,000 were killed. It has left the country completely broken. Now they've just elected Africa's first woman president. She was trained at Harvard, and the feeling is that she is not corrupt. Actually she's been tossing corrupt politicians out left and right. She's trying to get water on in Monrovia, the capital city, where a million people live. It'll take her years.

TGP: Do you do training or education once you put in a well?

SH: The training focuses on sanitation. It's not just as simple as putting a hole in the ground – it's all about teaching proper basic sanitation too, by which I mean latrines. Then the third component, after the well and sanitation, is hygiene – teaching kids stuff as simple as hand-washing techniques. So it's trying to find groups that work, with humility, alongside these villagers.

TGP: Are the villagers ever resentful of the help?

SH: Y'know, rarely. We're working in areas of such extreme poverty that the help is most welcome!  If the women and children are walking three or four miles to collect dirty, muddy, fetid water, they're really excited and grateful to have a clean-water source in their village. That basically frees up their days, and so their children have an opportunity to go to school since their day isn't spent wasting time and energy getting water that'll make 'em sick in the first place.

TGP: Do you run across corrupt officials that you have to bribe?

SH: Water is so basic. It's not microfinance.  I mean, it's water! What're you gonna do, steal a hand-pump? I mean, it's happened, but because you're doing something so basic and because the government feels a responsibility to give water to its people, they encourage it. They're not saying, "Oh, you're gonna build a $4,000 well, give us $500." They're encouraging you to come and do a $4,000 well. 

© 2007 Scott Harrison

TGP: What can hobbyist photographers do along these lines to help?

SH: I just encourage people to use their images to tell stories of the poor. You can be a tourist, you can be anyone – you don't have to be a professionally trained photographer, because neither was I. Go out and engage the poor, and it'll completely change your life, and when you come back, tell their stories. Get your friends involved. Your friends will want to help. Try and make it real to them. When you go, it changes you.

We actually are actively recruiting volunteer photographers to go and prove the wells. Every well that we build, we have a GPS coordinate, the name of the village, the population it serves, and a picture, so people can see that it actually exists. We set you up with a local partner, your host in the country, and you basically go bring back the story of the wells. The whole trip might cost you three or four thousand dollars for two weeks.

It's funny –  a nightclub-owner friend of mine flew himself to Uganda, and I was like, "Alright, let me give you this GPS device," and he e-mailed back six GPS coordinates from northern Uganda, near the border of Sudan, and the photos of the wells still working. One of them needed a little repair and he arranged for the repair. So it's a pretty cool thing to do.

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