Like any poor country, Guyana is replete with occasions for despair about standards in everyday life. We can see the list in its various forms constantly in the news media, and it is a lengthy and well-known one – no need to replicate it here. At the same time, it is also true that caught up in all that gloom we often fail to notice that there are individuals in the society who show that high standards can be accomplished by persons who are committed to a cause – that, in the darkness, and sometimes unheralded, there are people making a mark.
One such is Stabroek News photographer Arian Browne whose informal photographs appear daily in a special section of the newspaper. It’s headed simply ‘Photos,’ but don’t let that simple heading mislead you; it’s actually much more than that. What Arian is giving us, every day of the week, are amazing, sometimes startling, but always powerful views from the galaxy of life in and around Georgetown. From the range of the subjects – a man using the glass window of a business as a mirror to shave; a trailer moving down the street pulled by a man instead of a horse; children playing in floodwaters – Arian consistently and humanely shows us Guyanese coping with adversity and doing it with elan, or at least composure.
How he manages to secure these images, some of which are obviously fleeting, is in itself an achievement, but it is in the selection of his pictures that Arian shines. In the range of the images, and particularly their connection to everyday life, he is showing us the sociology around us, and to do that on a daily basis is a big ask. He is also great on detail. He spots things