Pep Bonet: Invisible Trace

Working closely with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is common practice in photojournalism. But for Noor Images photographer Pep Bonet, working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in one of the poorest and most dangerous places on earth, resulted in some very uncommon and powerful images. Mike Stanton talks to him about his experiences in Somalia, a country seemingly lost in conflict.

For the first three days in Mogadishu, Pep Bonet sat in a safe house and waited. “Luckily we had some whiskey and some movies, otherwise we would have gone crazy,” he says. “I was aware of things happening around me. I could hear them, but I couldn’t do anything.” Pep says he is always looking for something different, something that few people have experienced or witnessed. In 2004 he arrived in a place that was about as ‘different’ as you can get.

© Pep Bonet / Noor

A woman cooking at the MSF clinic in Jowhar, housed in a building damaged by war.

Before going to Somalia Pep had forged links with MSF, one of the few NGOs still operating in the country. They arranged for him to get into the capital via Nairobi. “As an independent photographer, as I was then, it would have been very difficult and expensive to get into the country,” says Pep. “There were no schedule flights into Somalia, only humanitarian or aid flights, or khat [leaf] flights.”

By 2004 Somalia had been at war with itself and other countries for 13 years and was the only country in the world to have no recognised government. Mogadishu had become synonymous with a kind of Dantean vision of hell on earth. Lawless, corrupt and violent beyond belief, the city had, in the Nineties, resisted attempts to control it by both US and UN forces. From that time, reports from Somalia began to dwindle along with political and humanitarian efforts. It was recently named joint-top of a league table of the world’s most corrupt countries, along with Burma.

© Pep Bonet / Noor

A bare classroom in the school of Eel Garas, Bakool. The absence of government for more than 13 years left a vacuum in which there had been no investment in public infrastructure.

“For me it has always been about a step into the unknown and learning through photography. Most of the time I don’t prepare my stories or what I’m going to do. I just go to a place and try to have time enough to really have an experience so I have no prejudice.”

There’s something open and calm about this approach to photography. Perhaps it comes from his time as a surfer. At one time he thought that chasing the big waves and the lifestyle associated with it would be his chosen career. But in the late Nineties, while living in Amsterdam, he started doing some street photography inspired by the work of Ed van der Elsken whose first show since his death was being staged in the city. Pep was taken by the natural way van der Elsken captured his subjects, along with the adventure that the work seemed to promise. He travelled to Cuba and Turkey, Vietnam, Burma and Thailand, and in 2002 he went to Sierra Leone and began a project that he is still working on today.

Pep then became aware that the Spanish, Belgian and Dutch sections of MSF wanted to report on the severe lack of humanitarian support in Somalia, and he approached them with a proposal. An agreement was made that Pep would received a salary in return for MSF using his pictures.

“In all of my long-term projects I want to avoid places where there are 20 photographers around. I didn’t meet any other photographers while I was there, although I’m sure there were some there. I always want to try to find something that’s a little exclusive.”

© Pep Bonet / Noor

A mother waits as her child is treated in a therapeutic feeding centre in Galcayo hospital run by MSF. Behind her, a poster incongruously depicts cruise liners sailing.