Picturing the Way to a Better Future

In the United States, a drink of water quenches thirst and promotes healthy growth. But for an estimated

one billion people who live mostly in the developing world, a drink of water is often dirty and riddled with disease and can lead to devastating illnesses or even death.

The black-and-white images in Gil Garcetti’s book Water Is Key: A Better Future for Africa, published this month, show how water affects every aspect of life in four West African countries. Photographs in the book illuminate despair (a line of men, all of whom contracted river blindness from contaminated water, wearing sunglasses and holding canes) and conclude with hope: a crowd of people jubilantly celebrating a new well.

The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, in Los Angeles, which since 1990 has supported clean-water and sanitation programs overseas, made a grant of $200,000 to pay for the book and an exhibit of the images at the Fowler Museum at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Mr. Garcetti, a former Los Angeles County district attorney who has mounted solo exhibitions of his photographs at museums around the country, took the images in the course of five trips to West Africa.

“Visiting the villages quickly brought home to me the consequences of unsafe water: infant mortality; severe and recurrent illness for villagers of all ages; blindness; very poor and unsanitary living conditions; low farm production; absence of opportunity for private enterprise efforts; and, especially for girls, no opportunity to attend schools,” he writes.

Proceeds from book sales will go to the Pacific Institute, in Oakland, Calif., which managed the project, and staff members there will decide which charities will receive money to finance water projects. In addition, 5,000 copies of the book have been sent to charities that expressed interest in receiving them.

“The failure to meet human needs for water is often a very hidden, unseen failure,” says Peter H. Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute and the editor of the book. “These images are fairly graphic and it’s a way of, without using words, bringing this issue into people’s awareness.”