Howard has worked as a photojournalist for eighteen years documenting major humanitarian crises in the 1990s. After the outbreak of violence in Rwanda in 1994 Howard made several trips to Rwanda and the Great Lakes region to document the work of aid agencies and the aftermath of the genocide.
Howard has been a photojournalist for eighteen years. During the 1990s he covered a number of humanitarian crises including Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda.
He first became involved with refugees while studying photojournalism in the late 1980s. At college he put together a photo essay on the experiences of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ settling in Britain.
Their plight stayed with him and on the way to visiting family in Australia, Howard stopped in Hong Kong and gained access to a Vietnamese refugee camp. The photographs he took at the camp started him on a long collaboration with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Since then Howard has photographed refugees and aid workers throughout the world.
When violence broke out in Rwanda in 1994, Howard used his contacts with UNHCR and Oxfam to travel to Africa. He worked at several refugee camps at Rwanda’s borders.
He came across some terrible scenes.
‘There were bodies every minute coming down [the river] and it didn’t stop all the time we were there, which was several hours, you [could] see body after body and they ended up in Lake Victoria…’
‘…‘it’s just such a staggering number of people to actually kill in such a short time.’
But Howard had to continue with his work which was to record what he witnessed.
‘Most of the time, probably 90 percent of the time, you get on with the job. The reason I go with aid agencies is because I like to report what they do and feel positive about that…’
Not all the refugees that Howard encountered in the region were innocent and this created conflicting emotions for him.
‘It was clear that amongst those people [the refugees] were the people who had actually taken part in the genocide…it was really confusing as somebody [who usually sees] refugees as people you should respond to compassionately…’
But the aid agencies could not be selective about who they helped.
‘Most of the time, probably 90 percent of the time you get on with the job.’
‘Especially the [Red Cross] field hospitals…they are extraordinary, [and] the surgeons cannot be …making moral judgements about the war…’
Despite what he has witnessed there, he feels that it is important not to get Africa out of perspective. In recent years, Howard has been to other parts of the continent working on children’s books that show ordinary life in Africa.
‘Far from everything is completely dysfunctional in Africa and the conflicts in the Balkans show that kind of brutality can happen anywhere.’
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