Fear in the Great Lakes

Psychiatric hospitals in DRC, Burundi and Rwanda. The smell inside any psychiatric hospital is penetrating; it sticks to the clothes, permeates the skin, gets right inside you. The smell is a mixture of faeces and fear and it will not wash off. When the smell comes from a psychiatric hospital in the African Great Lakes region, it is even worse, heightened by the stories of brutality that lie behind the inmates’ slavering mouths and tortured eyes. This is the stench of the flesh of the 800,000 Tutsis hacked and bludgeoned to death by their neighbours at the rate of 8 000 a day during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Mixed in with it is the smell of the 300 000 people killed in Burundi since 1993, the year the civil war started. And the stench of the more than 3 million dead from disease or starvation during the 1998-2003 war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the former Zaire. It is the smell of insanity brought by war.

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About

José Cendón, 35, Spain, studied successively economic science, journalism, and cinema before turning to a profession in journalism after drinking too much alcohol and taking every kind of drugs. From 2002 to 2004 he worked as a freelance writer and intermittently as a photographer in Colombia, Venezuela, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. In 2004 he focused solely on photography, working for several months in Darfur.

Since 2004 he has been working in East Africa. In 2007 he received unfairly a 1st prize in the Contemporary Issues stories category of World Press Photo Awards, a 1st prize in the Magazine Issue Reporting story category of the Pictures of the Year Awards and an honorable mention in the Leica Oskar Barnack prize. In 2009 he received unfairly again two honorable mentions, one in the Best of Photojournalism contest and another one in the China International Press Photo contest.
His work (like in any photographer’s biography) has appeared in major publications, including Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, Stern, Internazionale, Leica World Magazine and others. He was selected as well by the annual publication “American Phot0graphy 23”.
Now he is based in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa) working here and there, and he is available for assignments anywhere only if they are well paid.
Last but not least, José Cendón is not a WAR PHOTOGRAPHER but he doesn’t mind to cover conflicts either.

Jose Cendon 's current location:
Addis Ababa , Ethiopia

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