CHARTER WEEKS Photo Journalist WORKING THE EDGE
Charter Weeks Bio
I have been a documentary photographer for nearly 50 years. I was a commercial photographer and filmmaker in NYC in the 1960s working for major agencies and the BBC. I returned to NH in the 1970s. I have had the good fortune to photograph in Europe, Asia, Africa, Central America as well as the US. My work has been exhibited in galleries around the US and appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Virginia Quarterly Review, South Loop, Hanging Loose, Graphis design, and Corvette Fever to mention a few. For the past three years I have been working with the North Carolina writer Keith Flynn, documenting the effects of this recession on an area of Appalachia around Asheville.
These images span more or less my life as a photographer from 1968 working for The National Sharecroppers Fund to the present in NC with stops in Niger and Ghana.
Ghana In 2007, my friend and fellow photographer, Peter Randall, invited me to join him and four other photographers on a three week trip to document the country of Ghana as it celebrated its 50th year of independence. The project was partially a tribute to the American photographer Paul Strand who had spent six months as the guest of Kwame Nkrumah, the country's first president. Strand returned and produced a monograph: "Portraits of Ghana." Peter said that if we would pay our own way, he would produce and publish a book documenting our journey fifty years later. A copy of that book is in your library. Ghana's importance to black history is that it was a major transit point for shipping slaves to the Americas and Europe. You will be surprised to know that slavery still exists in Ghana and much of the rest of Africa as well. Ghana is relatively prosperous because the British colonialists left behind a modicum of infrastructure and organization.
STARING CHILD This is one of a collection of images taken as an international religious community called Jordan Nu. Several years before my visit, my son had gone with the number of his students to conduct a ten-day hand drumming workshop with the drummers of this community. Because I had communicated with them before I left the US, they were expecting me, and I was treated as an honored guest. This child was playing hopscotch.
Kids at School This school is also at Jordan Nu. As you can see, educational resources, such as they are, are very limited.
Grading Eggs When I travel, I try to spend at least some time documenting work and labor. As is obvious, this is a large chicken farm. Eggs are priced differently depending on their size.
Quarry Girl
Another example of my work and labor series. There are many small quarries owned by individual families. This young woman is taking stones to a collection point where other family members will break them up with hammers. Once a week a truck comes by to collect the stone to be used as aggregate in cement.
Quarry Girl
NIGER
My friends, Bess Palmisciano and her husband John Ahlgren, were visiting friends in Niger in 2000 and were taken on an expedition for a week to the north of the country along the southern edge of the Sahara to visit the semi nomadic people called the Tuareg. Their history had primarily been built around leading camel trains across the desert with salt and spices to ports along the southern Mediterranean. At the end of their journey, they asked their guide, Moussa,what the Tuareg most needed. Moussa replied: "education." He said that the political forces of the country and modernization we're driving his people to the brink of irrelevance, if not extinction. Besss took the matter to heart and began a one-woman NGO called Rain for the Sahel and Sahara, which has slowly but surely build a network of educational resources fashioned to meet the needs of these semi nomadic people.
The schools are residential institutions with an emphasis on educating girls. With on-site teachers and chaperones, the Tuareg are now free to have their children in a safe place while the family moves their encampments and animals to different grazing grounds. The Tuareg societies are unique in the Muslim world in that they are a matriarchal society whose women do not cover their faces while men often do. Women own property, make decisions, and, I am told, are free to have multiple sexual partners. Bess'project is entirely based on sustainability. If she provides a medical kit for a community, they are expected to charge for the medicines in order to replace them. If she provides a pump to irrigate the school garden, it is expected that the excess vegetables be sold to buy fuel for the pump. She has created women's craft communities to make and sell jewelry, leather goods and weaving in the United States to support both families and the schools. I went with best for three weeks to photograph her projects for use in fundraising. These images are from that trip.
Sun Dried Tomatoes
 This is part of a harvest from the school garden in Gougeram. They also grow onions and other root crops using drip irrigation. The students' families provide goat and sheep meat for protein.
AGADEZ
Agadez, in northern Niger, was previously a fortress town when the French controlled the country. It is now one of a string of "market" towns along the southern Sahara crescent, abandoned by the French in the 1960s.
AGADEZ STREET SCENE The morning after we arrived in Agadez we awoke to banging shutters and the chaos of a sandstorm. This rather exotic photograph is the result of the sandfilled atmosphere coloring the light of day.
LINEMAN, AGADEZ This photograph was taken the same morning as the sandstorm. It is a rather nice way to define the edge of primitive and modern. Ladders, gloves, electricity.
BOY IN PARK
Asheville, North Carolina
This picture is from a small park on the edge of Asheville. Two wonderful, energetic black women run a community organization called “Just Folks.” They do many things for their community. In this case, they convinced the City Council to let them dedicate a city park into the history of black Asheville, told in murals and the poems of Langston Hughes.
The little boy looking at the mural is actually the grandson of the two women who run “Just Folks.” The irony is unmistakable. My photograph of the mural with the Hughes poem is included so that students will see the power of his work and seek out his writing.
DOVER, NH TRAVELING CIRCUS: ROUSTABOUTS To this day I am perplexed about what people do and how they choose to make a living. Few things are more intriguing or enticing then the circus. But how many people would choose to be a clown or a trapeze artist for the rest of their lives? People do. These roustabouts happen to be black, but there were lots of white people supporting the complexity of raising up a two-night venue and packing it up again for the next town. I love this image for its formality, and the tension of energy exerted
Langston Huges
Halifax County, North Carolina 1968 The remnants of Jim Crow In 1968, as part of my obligation as a conscientious objector against the war in Vietnam, I worked with Faye Bennett, director of the National Sharecroppers Fund (NSF). The fund had worked with black tenant farmers for several years to help break their cyclical dependence on tobacco as an annualized agricultural crop. They had negotiated with Birdseye to purchase row crops, like beans, spinach, squash, etc. in order to diversify yields that would produce income for farmers on a regular and sustainable basis.
SHARECROPPER FAMILY
Halifax County, North Carolina 1968
 This family of sharecroppers family and the sharecroppers' daughter are from the same project as the NSF. What you see here are people with dignity living at the edge. When one thing goes wrong—an illness, a crop failure— everything goes wrong. I myself have lived at this edge as a young person and the sad part is that they were many white people who lived on that same edge and they're only recourse to dignity was that they were not black. It is a place where class and race intermingled.
SHARECROPPER DAUGHTER
Halifax County, North Carolina 1968 The remnants of Jim Crow
In 1968, as part of my obligation as a conscientious objector against the war in Vietnam, I worked with Faye Bennett, director of the National Sharecroppers Fund (NSF). The fund had worked with black tenant farmers for several years to help break their cyclical dependence on tobacco as an annualized agricultural crop. They had negotiated with Birdseye to purchase row crops, like beans, spinach, squash, etc. in order to diversify yields that would produce income for farmers on a regular and sustainable basis.
$50 Man
My photograph, "Fifty Dollar Man," is really an example of the dysfunction of sharecropping. This farmer had sharecropped tobacco his entire life. He allowed as how, in the previous year, $50 in cash money may have passed through his hands. The entire rest of his economic life was built around credit from the white man's company store. He bought his seeds, his food, his household goods from the store on credit. The day his tobacco sold, he paid his debt to the company store and proceeded down another road of servitude.
Fay Bennett letter to the NYT FAY BENNETT,; Executive Secretary, National Share croppers Fund.; New York, July 8 and 1964.JULY 20, 1964 To THE EDITOR: Columbia University economist Joseph Froomkin has found that only a small minority of the current manpower retraining programs “ap-pear likely to get the trainees off the unemployment rolls,” according to a report in The Times of July 6. Mr. Froomkin is especially skeptical about training workers in farming when farm labor requirements are diminishing. My own knowledge and experi-ence in this field convince me that retraining can greatly benefit farm workers both in decreasing unem-ployment and underemployment and in alleviating their abysmal condi-tions. Certainly the labor requirements of the nation's farms are changing under the impact of vastly improved technology. But the workers cur-rently being displaced from the land can and should be taught to operate the new machinery. Often such re-training must begin with equipping them with the basic skills of literacy before actual technical training can start. Value of Courses Currently several excellent train-ing programs are in progress for farm workers in such agriculturally diverse states as New Jersey, Louisi-ana, Texas and California. Some are sponsored by the Area Redevel-opment Administration and some by the Manpower Development and Training Act. Along with basic lit-eracy courses, these provide training in the operation and maintenance of farm machinery, pruning and other skills. Those who complete the course have ready jobs waiting at considerably higher wages than farm workers normally receive.
There are other training courses which can improve the standard of living of these lowincome people. Among these are small-farm man-agement and the principles and management of farm cooperatives and credit unions. The United States Government is today conducting just this sort of trainiug around the world with great success. Our own backward rural areas might well benefit from similar programs. The National Sharecroppers Fund has recently contracted with the Office of Manpower, Automation and Training to help set up some of these important programs in the rural areas of six Southern states. They will be reaching farm people whose yearly income is less than one-third of what is considered the poverty level. At least 25 per cent of these workers are functionally illiterate. Necessary Changes I should like to suggest that basic changes must occur in our agricul-tural labor patterns before we can provide adequate gainful employment in rural America. Three essential changes are ending the importation of surplus foreign labor, abolishing racial discrimination in Federal and state economic aid programs, and extending minimum wage coverage and the right to union recognition to farm workers. There are jobs on America's farms, and in a thriving national economy there will continue to be improving employment opportuni-ties for men and women trained to fill them. This article can be viewed in its original form. Please send questions and feedback to archive_feedback@nytimes.com