Year of Global Africa :: On the Job in Abomey at the MSU Museum

Through April 30, 2019

On the Job in Abomey: Portraits of Working People in Benin
Photographs by Darcy Greene

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Location: MSU Museum
At Work in Abomey opens August 13, 2018 and will run through April 30, 2019.

Reception and Gallery Talk
Saturday, September 22 from 11am – 2pm

Work is universal. In every country and every culture around the world, people work to provide for their families, to improve their standard of living, and to find some degree of personal satisfaction in the jobs they do. Workers in Abomey, Benin, West Africa, are electricians, carpenters, artists, musicians, school teachers, veterinarians, and many other things. Here these workers share their stories and some of the products of their work. How do their stories compare to your own?

Darcy Drew Greene is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. She has worked as a graphic designer and documentary photographer. She is interested in multimedia storytelling and the many ways in which information can be shared over the web and mobile devices.

In 2011 she received a HARP grant to do research in Brazil on the work of French photojournalist, Pierre Edouard Leopold Verger(1902-1996). Based on the research, she traveled to Benin, West Africa, to re-photograph the places, people and events found in Verger's photographs. An exhibition, Revisiting Verger's Dahomey: a photographic contrast was held at the Michigan State University in 2014. She is currently working on an exhibition entitled On The Job in Abomey: portraits of working people in Benin. The exhibition will open at the MSU Museum in August 2018.

During the summers she co-directs Photo Communication in the U.K., Czech Republic and France, a Journalism course offered through MSU's Study Abroad Program.