LIVE 8 by Damaso Reyes

Live 8: A Photographer’s Journal

By Damaso Reyes
EMAIL DAMASO REYES

Live 8 was billed as a global event and certainly lived up to that with concerts on four different continents and hundreds of performers who came together not to ask the worldwide audience for money but to raise awareness and to encourage them to place pressure on the leaders of the G8 nations who will soon meet in the United Kingdom to adopt a concrete plan to eliminate poverty in the near future. But what if you threw a party to end poverty and nobody came?

Of course that didn’t happen in Philadelphia or London, Paris, Berlin or Tokyo. Millions of people attended and hundreds of millions more watched on television and computer screens around the world. But what was it exactly that they were watching? In Philadelphia my worst fears were confirmed when Anna Nicole Smith was assisted to the small stage in the press tent. Wisely, she was not allowed to answer questions but she simply stood in front of a background festooned with Live 8 symbols and proceeded to shake, shimmy, grab her breasts and shake her behind for about five minutes as photographers shot frame after frame, continuously firing their flashes. One photographer screamed “Anna Nicole, feed the world!” To which she responded by smiling and showing off her cleavage.



I was disgusted. So disgusted at first I refused to take any photographs. And then I remembered that my revulsion was no excuse for me to indulge a case of moral superiority: I had to take her photograph if for not other reason than to expose the hypocrisy of an event which would allow itself to be used in such a shameful way. After she left the stage I rose from my seat and faced my fellow journalists and asked: “Does anyone feel as disgusted as I do? What the hell was that?”

I am still waiting for a suitable answer.

In London a video was played of television footage taken more than twenty years ago of starving Africans which helped to inspire the original Live Aid. The video froze on the image of a young girl, near death and soon that young lady, healthy and fully grown, was produced on stage as proof that our caring can save lives and change the world. Dressed beautifully in white, she clutched a microphone as Madonna came out and sang Like a Prayer.

But she never spoke a word. At least from what we saw here in America.



These concerts were to benefit Africans but except for the Tokyo lineup African performers were largely absent from the stages. How can we help a continent when we exclude them from devising the solutions to their own problems?

As someone who has worked in Africa as a journalist, a witness to some of the worst things our global society has allowed to happen, Live 8 struck me as a sad exercise in making ourselves feel better. In one sense the day at least served as a counter to the belief that our society instills in us that we as individuals cannot make a difference. But the idea that a music show can change society or inspire eight of the most powerful men in the world to focus on the eradication of global poverty is, as much as it hurts me to say it, naïve. The first Live Aid did not address the systematic underlying issues that cause famine in Africa and Live 8 is not doing addressing the issues which take the lives of 3,000 Africans every day.

We don’t need more concerts, we need more conversations, we need more education. Most of all we need to accept responsibility for our role in causing suffering and to understand that we all need to become active in correcting it.

We need to start caring. No concert is going to really make that happen and we shouldn’t delude ourselves into believing that it will.