The small, drab plastic bag lying on my desk is not a thing of beauty — at least not for well-fed and gastronomically fastidious me. Its contents are a layer of rice atop a layer of something resembling crushed builder’s rubble studded with nuggets of orange and green.
Cooked, however, this combination of rice, soya mince and dehydrated vegetables will feed six people who would otherwise go hungry. It is, in its way, manna, provided not by a supreme being but by Stop Hunger Now, an organisation with the stated aim of “feeding millions of people”.
By contrast, the book that lies next to it is a most desirable thing of beauty, its glossy black cover bearing the photograph of a man, face shrouded by a fringed kaffiyeh, dark eyes gazing into the distance as he lies against a sand dune, the mysterious waves of a desert undulating to the horizon behind him.
The connection between the two ill-matched objects is a desire to help, to try to improve life for people in need. Zimbabwean-born Johannesburg businessman Jack Halfon’s Faces and Places: A Photographic Journey is inspiring as much for its content as for the intentions of its creator who, aware of his good fortune, has donated all proceeds from its sale to Stop Hunger Now.
The faces are the product of a talented photographer with an insatiable zest for travel and for bringing home his memories in tangible form. They offer the book’s viewers, not readers — there is no text apart from the place and date of each shot — an intimate picture of a range of people in 16 countries, among them South Africa, France, India, Morocco, Argentina and the United States.
These compelling black-and-white portraits seem to reach into the souls of their subjects and, although many of those subjects are poor, desperate, clad in rags, weary or work-worn, the one common feature is the dignity with which Halfon and his camera have endowed them — the same dignity the proceeds will offer parents given the opportunity to feed their families and send their children to school on a full stomach.
The places of the title take the viewer from the slums of Mumbai to the ancient arches of Avignon; from a soaring cathedral in Boston to the desert sands of Dubai. The places aren’t always peopled and the people are rarely placed, although where they are — woman and calf in a field in Agra, Ethiopia’s burdened wood collectors trudging down a forested hill — they are integral to the setting. This is a book to cherish and a cause to espouse.
The book is only available online from his website.