Water Is Key: A Conversation with Gil Garcetti

We were delighted and honored to sit down with Gil Garcetti at MB Abram Studios, Los Angeles and discuss his work and photographs taken in West Africa. We found Garcetti’s story riveting, and his telling engaging, caring, and hopeful.

Between 2001 and 2002, in a project commissioned by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Garcetti documented the dignity, and the desperate, life changing need for safe water on the African continent. He visited the peoples of Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, and Niger, listening to the stories, celebrating the cultures, and joining in efforts to bring clean water to their communities.

Garcetti’s book Water Is Key—A Better Future for Africa (2007) inspired essays by Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and Mary Robinson. The photographs have been exhibited at the United Nations, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and many other venues, and have sparked a demand for Garcetti as a speaker on the subject of both photography and humanitarian efforts.

Please also visit our selection of Gil Garcetti’s West Africa photographs. Visit⟶

Gil Garcetti Water Is Key / Part I

Water Is Key / Part II