The diamond diggers,
they’re all constantly looking over their shoulder.
We had heard about these massacres
where helicopter gunships had mowed down
all these diamond diggers.
At one point, when I was photographing,
and suddenly everyone started running.
My name’s Robin Hammond. I’m a photojournalist.
So I started this project,
documenting the discrimination that LGBTQI+ folks face.
I’ve documented stories
from 14 different countries around the world.
This is a photograph of Bauchi local government vigilante group
in northern Nigeria.
I heard about four young men in the north of the country
who had been arrested for committing same-sex acts.
One of the young men told me about how he was attacked
by a vigilante group who saw men having sex with men as an evil vice.
I knew where some of the vigilantes were hanging out.
I simply went up to them,
and they were quite proud to pose in front of the camera
with their weapons.
They thought that what they were doing
was providing a service for their community.
At the same time,
that so-called service meant the discrimination
and sometimes quite violent acts of bigotry
towards young gay men in their neighborhood.
This project became this collaboration.
I would be working with LGBTQI+ folks
and trying my best to interpret their story visually.
So this is Sally, and I met Sally in Lebanon.
And at the time,
the so-called Islamic State were controlling much of Syria.
And she, with many other LGBT folks
and many other Syrians,
had fled the country and fled ISIS.
ISIS were actively hunting down gay men and trans women
and executing them.
They would often use hookup apps.
So they would essentially bait people into meeting them
and then blindfold them, tie their hands behind their back,
and throw them from the tallest building in the city.
Sally didn't want to show her face.
She felt that it wasn’t going to be safe for her.
But she also spoke of her gender identity.
This photograph, I think, speaks to that,
this period of transition she’s about to embark on.
I worked in St Petersburg with several LGBT activists
who were really outspoken,
which was amazing in an environment
where they face such severe discrimination.
Daria was one of those activists.
She was beaten to near death
by a group of men with baseball bats,
and she was stabbed and left for dead.
She nearly bled out.
The knife is an indication of the attack,
but also it’s a pose of defiance as well.
And she wanted to show her face,
she wanted to use her name,
and she refused to live in fear of
the people who had tried to take her life.
So I first went to Zimbabwe in 2007.
Robert Mugabe was essentially the dictator of the country.
I wanted to understand
how could a country with these abundant natural resources
have people who are living in such poverty
and suffering so much.
This is a photo from the Marange diamond fields.
When they were discovered,
lots and lots of people came from all around the country
to dig for these diamonds.
And then, of course, the government realized that
they were losing potentially millions of dollars
and essentially killed a lot of people
in order to make sure they didn’t come back.
We had heard about these massacres
where helicopter gunships had mowed down
all these diamond diggers.
These people were still digging there.
So we had traveled to the diamond field
to try and find these guys.
He’s got this large sort of iron pick in his hand,
which he’s using to prise rocks away in search of these diamonds.
They’re all constantly looking over their shoulder,
waiting for the military to turn up.
At one point when I was photographing,
and suddenly everyone started running.
Turned out to be a false alarm.
Many of them had been witness to
their friends being killed by the military.
They were really fearful.
When I was working in Zimbabwe,
the country had one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.
So this is Zachariah being bathed by his nephew,
who was his primary carer.
He’s in a hospice for people living with HIV/AIDS.
I really thought it was important
that people came away with no illusion that
the greed of a few people meant that people were dying.
Infrastructure falls apart.
Health workers are not paid.
Hospitals are without medication.
And this is the result.
Just three hours after this picture, Zachariah passed away.
During a cholera crisis in 2008,
thousands of people were dying every day,
and the gravediggers were extremely busy.
They were digging five, six times the normal number of graves
as they were before.
I remember one mother and father who were burying their child.
The mother walked through the graveyard with a small bundle.
I asked if I could photograph while they buried their child,
and they said no,
and I just sat with them while they buried their baby.
As a photojournalist, obviously, our job is to tell the stories—
the realities of life for people
and how some of those people’s lives end.
But sometimes, it’s just not appropriate
to tell those stories.
In a lot of countries around the world,
mental health is severely neglected.
In many sub-Saharan African countries,
mental health issues are seen as a spiritual affliction,
and so they seek spiritual remedies.
I traveled around Ghana,
visiting healers who were restraining people with chains.
This is in a facility of a traditional healer.
The woman who runs this facility,
she brews her own remedies
for people with all kinds of afflictions,
from the physical to psychological.
This room here is for people who are living with mental health issues
and drug addiction issues.
These young men were keen to have their plight known.
They absolutely did not want to be in chains.
They did not want to be in this facility.
They were brought here mostly by relatives who thought that
being here and receiving the traditional medicines
would help them.
Most of them were pretty clear that
it wasn’t helping them at all.
I was really struck by this young man in particular,
really because of the way that he posed.
I asked him if I could take his photograph,
and I think he was lying down at the time.
And he sat up, and he deliberately posed this way for the camera.
It’s quite humanizing, this picture, and that’s why I took it.
So this is Sara, who I met in northern Ghana.
She's chained to a tree in a prayer camp.
She first developed a mental health condition
after she had her last child.
She’s been brought here by her family members for healing.
She wasn't chained at that point, but she tried to run away.
When asked why she tried to run away,
she explained that she just wanted to see her baby.
I was with my friend and partner Stephen Asante,
who’s a mental health nurse that I had worked with.
Several weeks later, he was able to go back,
make sure she was removed from the chain,
get her medication,
support her into an economic generating activity.
She became a farmer.
And with medication and with the income,
she was able to start to tackle
some of the mental health issues that she was struggling with.
Sometimes, the work has a happy ending.
Society is shaped by the stories we tell,
but who gets to tell whose story?
And if you’re from a marginalized group,
often it means that the narrative of your life
is controlled by someone else.
So the work that I do
tries to amplify the voices of marginalized groups—
give them the opportunity and the space
to be able to take back control of that narrative.
I feel like the world would be a much better place
if we all had the chance to be authentically represented
in the way that we see ourselves.