The many Benjamins of Beni

I thought seeing as I had a new platform to show the work off I would revisit something from the archive. This was one of those random mini projects that sometimes come about when you are somewhere interesting with a free day to use at your own leisure. I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) back in 2017 working for an NGO in the town of Beni when I had one such free day. Earlier in the trip I had noticed there were lots of interesting paintings of a guy with glorious flowing hair and a slightly stern look about him. I asked my fixer what these pictures all meant and he explained that they were all images of the same man, Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of the United States. He’s synonymous with the $100 dollar bill, and the stalls were those of money changers.

On my free day I was able to travel round the town with our fixer trying to capture as many of the stalls as I could find. It turns out there were a few different sign painters in the town who between them produced the majority of these works of art. If I had had more time I would love to have found one or two of them and see if they were happy to show me how they went about it all. Sadly after perhaps an hour or two of shooting around town we got approached by plain clothes policeman and it was clear that my exploration was going to be shut down unless we wanted to to start negotiating some kind of bribe to be left alone. Sometimes you’ve got to know when to call it quits…