In most countries the mentally ill are in hospitals or, as has been increasingly common in the U.S. since the 1960s, on the streets, fending for themselves, or in jail. According to Colors, the Los Angeles County Jail is home to 2,800 mentally ill individuals, and more than 315,000 prison inmates in the United States are mentally ill. Belgium has an innovative foster parent system in which patients are incorporated into families, while Ivory Coast has the most startling, and starkly inhumane, approach: according to Colors, "madness is believed to be caused by spirits that take over the body. To drive these spirits out, those considered mentally ill and dangerous are chained to trees, prayed over every day, regularly beaten and given little food."

The afflicted villagers are sometimes left there for years. Leonie, 19, laughs and says, "Hit me on the head, I'm bad, I'm bad." Basile, 30, has been chained to a root in the ground for six months. "I've lost my mind," he says. And hunched-over Augustin, 44, explains, "I can hardly stand up because my back hurts so much. I was chained for 12 years. I'm here because I've studied too much, I have too much knowledge."

But, Colors reveals, an angel has come to Ivory Coast's hell on earth in the person of Gregoire Ahongbonon, and his mission is to release the ill from their chains. "In almost every village," Ahongbonon tells Colors, "there is a person chained up ... The family often chains them out of ignorance." When Ahongbonon frees one of the afflicted, he first hugs them before the entire village (as madness is considered contagious by the villagers), then gives them a haircut, a manicure and bathes them. Later, he assigns them jobs, gives them freedom to move around one of his six welcoming centers and even lends them his car.

Ahongbonon trenchantly puts the barbaric Ivory Coast methods in perspective when he points out that the conditions in modern mental hospitals can also be crude and brutal. "You know, in so-called developed countries," he says, "the solution isn't much better. I've seen your hospitals. You lock patients into rooms, drugged to the eyeballs: It's not much different from chaining them to a tree."

Colors has always been the product of a peculiar marriage of social conscience, photojournalism and fashion marketing. (Though No. 47 carries no references to Benetton, except in the fine print, there are about a dozen pages of advertising, mostly from apparel companies.) The rap from Colors' detractors has been that it's sensationalistic -- marketing masquerading as socially relevant journalism. In Salon's 1999 obituary on Kalman, Matthew Haber wrote, "The magazine he created existed to promote a multinational corporation's brand identity and an expansive, multi-ethnic philosophy. It pushed boundaries in terms of its editorial emphasis on politics, and it pushed design to the point of post-literacy by making words secondary to images."

That's true, and Colors is no doubt an effective marketing device for the Benetton Corp., but the company -- at least in the "Madness" issue -- has made itself all but invisible. What's left is a masterwork of photojournalism with little intrusion by advertising. The essay achieves terrific momentum over its 90-plus pages. Given the quality the magazine often attains, Benetton's motives for producing Colors seem irrelevant.

Indeed, the squabble over Benetton's motives reminds me of a story I worked on more than a decade ago when New York hotel magnate Leona Helmsley was everywhere being demonized for her bad behavior. She was less popular than Cruella DeVille. Here in San Francisco, Helmsley's company owned a large apartment complex from which a woman, a longtime tenant with health problems, was about to be evicted. When Helmsley got wind of it (and after the media had also gotten wind of it), she immediately canceled the eviction. In an interview about the matter with an official of the San Francisco Sheriff's Department, who would have had to enforce the eviction, I questioned Helmsley's motive. "But really," I said to the official, "why do you think she did it?"

"It doesn't matter why she did it," he said. "She did the right thing. That's all that matters."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The photographers whose work appears in Colors No. 47 are: Georgi Bogdanov, Boris Missirkov (Albania); Ingvar Kenne (Australia); Raymond Wouda (Belgium); Juliana Stein (Brazil); Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin (Cuba and Italy); Stefan Ruiz (Cuba); James Mollison (Ivory Coast); Dave Southwood (South Africa); Emily Mott (USA).

Recent Stories