Photojournalist · Kenya
Dan Eldon
Dan Eldon (1970–1993) was a British-American photojournalist who grew up in Nairobi. Working for Reuters, he photographed the famine and war in Somalia in 1992–93, and was killed by a crowd in Mogadishu on 12 July 1993, aged 22, along with three colleagues. His collage journals were later published as The Journey Is the Destination.
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Nairobi and the road south
Dan Eldon was born in London in 1970 and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, where his mother, Kathy Eldon, worked as a journalist. As a teenager he was already photographing, travelling across Africa and filling journals with collages of photographs, drawings, maps, tickets and writing.
He also learned early to turn travel into action. After a scouting drive from Nairobi to Malawi in 1989, and while studying at Pasadena City College in California, he founded Student Transport Aid, and in the summer of 1990 he led a group of young people by road from Nairobi through Tanzania to a refugee camp in Malawi. They gave one of their vehicles to Save the Children and money for wells and blankets for a children's hospital, and drove home.
Somalia
In 1992 he went to Somalia, where famine and civil war were killing hundreds of thousands of people, and became one of the youngest photographers ever to work for Reuters. His pictures helped bring the famine to the world's attention.
On 12 July 1993 American helicopters of the UN operation attacked a command post of the warlord General Mohamed Farah Aidid in Mogadishu, killing more than seventy Somalis, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Survivors came to the hotel where foreign journalists stayed and urged them to see what had happened. At the site a crowd turned on the reporters. Eldon was killed with two Reuters colleagues, both Kenyans — Hos Maina and the soundman Anthony Macharia — and Hansi Krauss of the Associated Press. He was 22.
The journals
Eldon left seventeen journals, kept from his early teens until his death. Each page is a collage of his photographs with drawings, maps, tickets and handwriting, layered until the page becomes a picture in its own right. The pages run from his teenage years in Nairobi to his last months in Somalia. In 1997 Chronicle Books published a selection, edited by his mother, as The Journey Is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon. Within months nearly 30,000 copies had been sold. Kathy Eldon said she published them not as a memorial but to encourage readers to treat their own lives as works of art.
How to look at his work
His news photographs and his journals are two sides of the same eye. The Reuters pictures were made for the wire service, to be sent quickly and printed the next day. The journals follow no rules at all, and they are where his own voice is. Look at them as diaries made with a camera and scissors rather than words alone: the famine in Somalia, the teenage road trips and the jokes all sit on the same pages. That mix of the serious and the playful is what sets them apart from his news pictures, and from most war photography.
Legacy
Kathy Eldon and Dan's sister, Amy, founded the Creative Visions Foundation to support people who use media and art for social change. A feature film based on the journals, The Journey Is the Destination, directed by Bronwen Hughes, with Ben Schnetzer as Dan and Maria Bello as Kathy, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016. Hughes had come to the story through the book.
Where to see his work
The journals are best seen in the book, which has appeared in later editions. The film is the most accessible telling of his life, and a website, daneldon.org, keeps an archive of his journals and his story.
See also
Kenya's own great photojournalist of the period, Mohamed Amin; African photography; and our list of African photographers.
