What Didn’t Make It Into Witness, Part I

As you can imagine, there is a lot that goes into making a book, especially an anthology of 20 years of work containing 300,000 photographs. My new book, Witness, is coming out soon, and I’m in the final stages of copy editing it and making sure I have all the right photographs in it. But there are so many to choose from…so I’m not sure. To placate my anxiety about this, I am going to start posting a few that I know aren’t going in, but that I still desperately want to find a place for in the book but probably won’t. So here is the first one.

Here is the backstory, when I shot this image for Mercy Corps in May, 2016 in Jijiga, Ethiopia: Berwako (she’s in the truck) buys milk from about 350 local pastoralist households every day, paying them 70 birr (a little more than $3) for every five liters of milk. Women in this village used to sell their milk to passing cars along the highway, but now they don’t have to leave their village to receive cash on the spot. Milk is a critical part of pastoralist Ethiopia, a central source of food and income for millions of people. Thanks to Mercy Corps, milk is now processed locally and is a higher quality, improving the incomes for hundreds of pastoralists and their families.

I loved this shoot, and this image. But there are more from the sequence, one of which DID go into the book. SO–want to get the book? I want you to get the book. But it’s not quite ready. So do me a favor, just so I can see who is reading these blog posts. Comment below saying you want it and I’ll make sure you get an email when it’s ready to order. That won’t be long by the way. As I said, the book done and going into copy edit this week. So you won’t have long to wait. More soon.