The Woman Who Shot the World

Amanda Koster is taking media on a social trip

by T. LaBee

While on her first trip to Ethiopia, professional photographer, Amanda Koster, took a picture of a young giggling boy holding up a bushel of the bananas he was selling on the side of the road. He was wearing a winter coat and standing behind him was a little girl smiling. She then brought that photo back to the U.S.

“I showed some people some of my pictures and they honed in on this particular picture of this boy with the bananas,” she remembers. “They looked at me and they said, ‘Are you sure that you were in Ethiopia? Are you sure? Because this kid isn’t starving. He’s holding food and he’s wearing a winter jacket’” Aside from the fact that someone would actually think that she could have been mistaken about what country she was in, Amanda was also taken back by the fact that even a group of educated people, like those she had shown the photographs to, would be so ignorant about this country that they actually steadfastly believe that everyone there is starving in the desert, covered in flies.

“The reason they thought this is because the only pictures they had seen, up until that point, were pictures that Sebastiao Salgado took of babies being weighed in grain scales during the famine of the eighties.” Although she is an inspired fan who studied the Brazilian photographer in school, Amanda has made a decision to try to avoid taking the shocking and depressing style of photographs that pervades Salgado’s career.

“I don’t feel that it does people a whole lot of respect. Plus, enough people out there are bringing back all these pictures so why do I need to be another photographer bringing back just sad stories that creates a sense of hopelessness out there?”

Amanda has expanded her artistic ideology from a personal mode of operations into an actual organization. After spending years, taking photos all over the world, and having so many people asking her if they could come along, she decided to found Salaamgarage (www.salaamgarage.com), a socially conscious travel company for media savvy people. She describes it as, “essentially creating trips that I would have done on my own, but opening it up to eight or ten people to come along and work on this particular project with a focus.”

This adds successful company founder to an already impressive list of titles that she has been accumulating over the years; professional photographer, activist, anthropologist, teacher, and soon to be published author.

The activism came along before the photography. “I’d always been helping since I was real young for one reason or another. I don’t know why,” Amanda admits. “I’ve always felt that it was important to help. My mom asked me once, ‘why are you trying to help people so much’ and I just looked at her and told her ‘because I can’ and she just looked at me like, ‘okay’”

Amanda carried her love of people to college. “I thought I was going to be an anthropologist,” she confesses. “I studied anthropology, got a degree in that.”

Like so many other great discoveries, Amanda found her love for photography by accident. “I took a photography class because I thought that it would help me as an anthropologist. I thought that it would help to have good pictures of my research. It just seemed to make sense.”

When she took the course though she says, “that was it. I fell in love with photography. Madly in love. I actually caught some kind of crazy disease.”

She then enrolled into the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, Connecticut. “It’s just like 911 [Media Arts Center] basically. It’s just this little community school where the teachers are professional photographers. So I got to learn from pros.”

Amanda received a lot of support from the staff at Creative Arts. “They were able to teach me what it takes to start as a photographer, like, how to get into the business,” she reminisces. “They got me jobs. They got me internships at Yale and all this stuff. Unbelievable amount of support from this school. I owe a lot to that school.”

While attending Creative Arts Amanda took a class called “The Concerned Photographer” that paved her way and helped her figure out what kind of photography she wanted to do. In this class she had to do a photo essay that would help people and do a project on a photographer she admired.

As the photographer she admired she chose Sebastiao Salgado. “I was very influenced by his work,” Amanda expresses. “His images are unbelievable. He always shoots in black and white, 35mm, and I just felt that that’s what I wanted to do with my photography. Those pictures, you don’t have to speak any language to see the pictures. You can look at the pictures and you can just learn and see a situation that you’ve never seen before. A human situation that you might have never known about and a situation that needs help.”

For her photo essay she chose to photograph in a battered women’s shelter.
“I had to use a lot of different techniques that I had learned in photography to keep the women’s faces or certain children’s faces out of focus, or use motion, or something like that.”

That proved to be a pivotal project for her because when she showed those pictures to people she says, “they were really impacted. So that’s where it all started for me, in that class.”

In 2004 Amanda was planning a trip to Kenya. Around this same time she met a woman named Loyce Mbewa-Ong‘udi, who is from Kenya and at that time was trying to figure out a way to address a growing concern back in her native village of Rabour. This resulted in Loyce founding her non-profit organization, the Rabour Village Project.

“I saw there was a lot of changes in issues around HIV/AIDS and orphans,” Loyce recalls. “So Sara [a mutual friend] happened to be in a certain photography class room with Amanda, and Amanda also, at the very same time, had gotten some work she was going to do in Kenya, but in a different city.”

Together with Sara and another associate, Loyce and Amanda constructed a plan to tell the stories of about five people from the village to help illustrate, in a positive way, what is going on in the area and the various different ways that people are dealing with it.

Loyce explains, “I’m born and raised in this certain village where, though there is this problem, I wanted stories of what is right. Many people talk about the downfalls, and the sadness, and diseases, and all this stuff about Africa, but they never seem to talk about what is great. And my experience, having been in the U.S. and here for a short while, I seem to have had a lot of magnification of what is not right.”

After formulating the project that they called, AIDS is Knocking, Amanda headed to Kenya by herself with Loyce following later. Loyce put Amanda in contact with her family and had them show her around.

“We hadn’t had any photographers in the village.” Loyce admits that along with the two other members in their group Amanda was, “the first white people that really went to the village and lived in the community and brought back the stories in a honorable matter.”

The project had a lasting effect on Amanda. She explains, “the way Salaamgarage is structured is just like the project I did with Rabour Village Project.”

“When I created Salaamgarage,” Amanda remembers. “I saw people traveling and I saw people with travel albums and people putting their photographs into Flickr, Facebook, You Tube, all that social media that’s coming out.”

She noticed positive potential in these recreational activities. “People were creating content and bringing it back, and the content was about their trip. Like, ‘me in front of the Taj Mahal,’ or something. And I thought to myself, ‘well, what would happen if all those tourists, and all those travelers would visit an NGO for a couple days‘…..And instead of coming back and saying, Yeah, there‘s all this poverty and there‘s all these problems, actually meet people that are solving these problems and get to understand these problems on a different level. With a little more depth.”

Amanda attracted the attention of Seattle based Bennett & Hastings Publishing after their graphic designer got a look at a book Amanda made for her clients and friends.

Referring to Amanda’s photos and other content as, “graphic, intense work,” Celeste Bennett, co-owner of the independent publisher, felt that Amanda’s, “values really aligned with our values.”

“The publisher loved the idea about Salaamgarage…they thought ‘How could we make a book that shows your work and shows what your doing with Salaamgarage because we also want to support what you’re doing?’”

Instead of an photography book with just pictures it was decided to also include Amanda’s writing.

Amanda explains, “basically, the book is a collection of four different projects that I’ve done in the world in Brazil, Kenya, Romania, and Morocco and journals that I was writing while I was on these trips.”

The book’s name, Can I Come With You?, comes from the mouths of just about every person who use to ask Amanda about her trips before she started Salaamgarage.

“That’s basically why I started the whole organization in the first place, because so many people were asking me that,” she elaborates.

Amanda Koster’s fusion of media, travel, and social awareness has a made several positive ripple effects in the many different lives and countries she has visited, and she plans to continue this trend with among other things a trip to Vietnam next year to document the removal of land mines left over from the Vietnam war. Having a firm understanding of the importance of vision and pre-planning, Amanda has been preparing the trip since early last year.

“I don’t take on a project until I see the path,” she tells. “When I see the path, I can’t turn around. Like with Salaamgarage, whatever happens with Salaam Garage happens, but I saw that it could work.”

For more imformation about Amanda Koster and Salaamgarage go to www.salaamgarage.com