LH: But you don’t just include the magazine covers, you also include text.
AJ: Yes. I created a sequence where I produce the cover of the magazine and I also add the date and the events in Rwanda during that week. Basically, I wanted to show the criminal indifference of the magazine to what was happening in Rwanda at the time. A million people were killed in less than 100 days, and Newsweek magazine took 17 weeks to feature it on its cover.
LH: The final cover text [over an image of a child in a refugee camp] says, “Hell on Earth.” Could you explain just what that cover is?
AJ: It’s a very cynical cover in a sense, because it says, “Hell on Earth,” and it's too late. It’s been hell on Earth for the last 17 weeks. When that cover came out, the genocide had ended already and the press was already starting to focus on the plight of the refugees around Rwanda and those displaced within Rwanda.
LH: You were there with photojournalists who do their best to bring back to people what they’re witnessing in the field. How do you see the difference between a photojournalist’s work and an artist’s work?
AJ: I admire photojournalists. I find them everywhere I go and they’re trying to convey the reality of the world to the world community. And, for me, photojournalists and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are signs of solidarity in a landscape of tragedy and destruction. So I admire them deeply. But the difference is that I have much more time than they have. They are running around with these huge cameras, taking photographs and sending them to photo agencies to be published as soon as possible. They don’t control the way these images are presented to the world.
In my case, I can spend an entire afternoon with my little microphone, recording a conversation with a survivor, and my camera is quite ridiculous, to tell you the truth, compared to their cameras because I’m not interested in photography. I’m there to express solidarity and try to witness this reality and try later to convey it to my audience.
LH: They have just a short window when their images will be used or disseminated through newspapers, but you have a much longer time to reflect.
AJ: Absolutely, but they have the larger audience and I have a smaller one.
LH: As an artist, what do you feel your ethical role is when doing a project like this?
AJ: Every project of mine reacts to a specific event—in this case, the Rwanda tragedy. And I felt that the Rwandan people deserved better than what the world media had done with the genocide, and so I went to witness it and I tried to convey the suffering and the pain and the tragedy that the genocide meant for the Rwandan people. And I wanted to convey also that some people in the so-called “Western world,” from the so-called “world community,” cared about their state.
LH: What is the most an artist can hope for from their work?
AJ: Well, a work like this tries to inform people and to move them. A work like this tries to touch people and illuminate them. So, when similar events might happen in the future, they might read them differently.
LH: What’s your personal connection with Africa?
AJ: I lived 10 years of my life in a small French island called Martinique, which is a Black island. It’s a French department. And this is the birth country of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, the founders of the anti-colonialist movement called Négritude. I actually went to school to the Lycée Schoelcher, which was the school of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire and others.
So, that experience made me create very strong links with the African race and when I moved to New York in the early ’80s, I immediately realized that in spite of what I had read about the civil rights struggles and so on, there was still an enormous amount of racism in the United States and I decided to focus on this subject.
LH: And do you feel, 20 years on, that there’s been movement in a positive direction in representing Africa in the Western media?
AJ: I wish I could say yes, but no. Unfortunately, no. I’m afraid nothing has changed.
And what’s happening in the streets of our cities is the most terrible demonstration that we are still living in the middle of a quite racist society.
