NYAB Event - Peter DiCampo "Life Without Lights"

Peter DiCampo "Life Without Lights"

VII Photo Gallery

This event has ended.

Year-round in Ghana, the sun sets at 6pm and rises at 6am – thus, the residents of communities lacking electricity live half of their lives in the dark. Over ten years ago, the government of Ghana began a campaign to provide the country’s rural north with electricity, but the project ceased almost immediately after it began. The work sluggishly resumes during election years, as candidates attempt to garner popularity and votes. But at present, an estimated 73 percent of villages remain without electricity in the neglected north, an area comprising 40 percent of the country.

Living without lights is more than just a minor inconvenience. Electricity provides a paramount step on the ladder of economics, and northern villagers know what is being kept from them: lights to study and cook by, machinery and refrigeration, and a standard of living that would attract teachers, nurses, and other civil service workers from the city, not to mention foreign tourists. Potential economic growth is stifled and poverty’s cyclical nature is perpetuated.

Peter DiCampo’s long-term project on Energy Poverty depicts a global crisis, revealing the challenges faced by the 1.4 billion people who live without access to electricity worldwide. This exhibition shows the project’s roots in rural Ghana, where DiCampo began photographing village life at night, capturing both the haunting darkness and economic impact of life off the electrical grid. The work has been featured by The New York Times, Newsweek, MSBNC, and Wired, among other places, and won first prize in The British Journal of Photography’s 2010 International Photography Awards and awards in the 2011 PDN Photo Annual and 2011 Anthropographia Awards for Human Rights.