Matt Wignall and wells in foreign lands

PHOTO COLLAGE by MATT WIGNALL

Matt Wignall has reasons to find his name all across Long Beach: as Matt Wignall, photographer; Matt Wignall, musician; Matt Wignall, sometime writer and producer and engineer and as much a source of perspective and wisdom to Cold War Kids—whose first recordings came from his studio, and whose sound found first definition in his back yard and driveway—as Cold War Kids are to him; Matt Wignall, vegetarian and aspiring raw-food restaurateur. And now Matt Wignall sits with the photos from his coming exhibition of African photography at Orange County Performing Artscenter on the laptop in his lap, looking out a thick glass window downtown and watching cars lurch and shiver at a crosswalk stoplight and thinking about how ugly cars like the PT Cruiser are now, and how that kind of thing used to really depress him.

The joke when he was the Cold War Kids photographer was, “Wignall? He doesn’t talk much. . . .” and the punch line was you wouldn’t get away from him for hours: Bitching about petty problems and his failed music career, he’d write, though years as the principal writer in Havalina made a striking and idiosyncratic discography that lent reverence for a murky kind of Americana to that new wave of Biola blues bands. But he wrote that line about bitching about the morning he left for Africa, departing from a portfolio of music and fashion photography to document the installation of fresh-water wells in remote Malawian villages by a Manhattan Beach charity that saw what he’d done on the road with Cold War Kids and asked for help bringing new attention to their cause. (“100 wells in the last decade; 1,000 more in the next,” was their slogan.) And he returned, he admits, a cliché—“That’s why it’s a cliché, to say ‘enlightenment,’” he says. “You see life with everything stripped away”—but he acknowledges the change regardless.

“You learn how important it is not to just live a selfish life,” he says. “I sat down with my pastor at Grace Long Beach and I was like, ‘Man, I’m a misanthrope—I hate everyone, I hate life, I hate modern architecture! I don’t like anybody anymore!’ And his response was, ‘You should try being a pastor.’ But then he said, ‘You know what the answer is? Just serve people—be decent to your fellow man, figure out what you can do, and stop thinking about yourself all the time.’ And a week after that I got asked to go to Africa.”

So you had no idea you were going? I ask.

“No,” he says. And waits for the next question.

Tiny Wignall was a troublemaker, as he tells it—a Los Al High grad after being asked to leave Orange County High School of the Arts. Something about excuses to go streaking in the name of art, he smiles. A friend at a bookstore used to give him books for his birthday, and one year it was a book on exhibitionism. He recites the opening sentence from memory even now: “We as members of society need to learn to break free from the bonds and shackles placed on us.”

A Beat kid, he remembers, wanting to go find America—On the Road and Tom Waits and Cannery Row at 18 catalyzed something unformed in his personality, and he’d think about what his American experience was: “My American experience was I’d walk across the street to go surf in the ocean and I’d get a jaywalking ticket. Anywhere I’d go there were idiot rules and regulations keeping everything safe and tidy and clean. I was really really depressed for a long time about all that stuff.”
Before Malawi, he says, he’d spent 10 years touring America—experience that informed Havalina’s music, often listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s America—but before that and even before streaking out of art school, he remembers exactly the two particular artifacts that put him where he is today. One was the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run”—part of the album that taught him note-by-note how to play guitar when he was in just fifth grade.

And then: His mom’s youngest brother was a nature photographer with a vacation trailer in Yosemite; at his grandparents’ house, tiny Wignall was wondering about the orange light at the seams of his uncle’s darkroom, and in his uncle’s trailer one summer, he discovered what darkrooms were for. There was a book of Ansel Adams with pictures of El Capitan and the usual landmarks and then one different picture of a black rag caught on a barbed-wire fence.

“Something about that picture,” he says. “I’d stop and stare—something so much bigger than documenting a national park. For the rest of my life, I had this interest—what was that mood? What was that feeling?”

Kurt Dahlin and members of Manhattan Beach’s Breakwater Church started Water Wells for Africa in 1994 and started building wells in 1996 at a cost of about $5,000 each, funded by donations specifically designated only for charity purposes—one of the answers Wignall went after before he committed to the trip. “After I cynically went out and grilled everybody,” he says. “‘Where does the money go? Where does it come from? Who’s getting it? Who builds the wells? Do they give anything else?’ I wanted to make sure that if I was spending my time with a charity that the money went to the right place—not just ‘their heart’s in the right place, but they’re buying politicians Mercedes down there.’”

He’d see later how U.N.-built wells often failed in the field, and discover how grain aid and other assistance programs kinked the local economies, putting village farmers out of business. The more he learned, the more he decided that everything came down to fresh water. Water Wells specifies 37 percent of Malawi’s population has fresh water within a kilometer; the Malawi government claims an optimistic 67 percent, and UNICEF said 73 percent of the population had “improved drinking water sources” by 2004—but by Wignall’s calculations, only about 25 percent had access to clean water—some in rural areas were drinking from creek bottoms where water settled in the rainy season and slowly sank deeper into the ground. The biggest sicknesses are dysentery, cholera and malaria, he says, but provide fresh water and not one other thing and they have the key to flushing out disease.

“The only thing I can see those people need to get the whole world functioning is water,” he says. “It’s not so much different than the settlers in America. They know how to live off the land. They just need a basic resource—water. And that unlocks every other door.”

In New Orleans on tour, Wignall left Bourbon Street and found a clown he drew out of character to find where the real Creole food was: “I spent an hour, had a beer—‘Let’s clown down!’” (“Wignall? He doesn’t talk much. . . .”) But in Malawi, he couldn’t talk much. He didn’t speak Chichewa. At one point, his translator told him he was one of the most cynical people he’d ever met—“I laughed,” says Wignall. “I didn’t think it was cynicism—think how much America screws up in the world!”—and when his translator was still asleep, Wignall would wake up in the village chief’s mud hut and step quietly outside.

For two weeks last July, Wignall, Water Wells co-founder Kurt Dahlen, and his daughter and a translator and driver visited remote Malawian villages where wells had just been installed or were just about to be installed. These were distant places—villages so far out that the residents had no distinct concept of 21st century life, where children would run away screaming from weird white Wignall, or where other children would surround him as he sat resting under a tree to play with his hair. He’d told Water Wells he didn’t want to shoot water drops and cisterns—he wanted more representative shots, which came only after careful quiet time spent keeping his camera from becoming the center of attention. He wore a jacket every day to conceal it, he says: “My full-time job was to hide my camera so I could try and capture them living their lives,” he says. “As opposed to the typical shot—a hundred kids chasing after your car, which does happen. But that doesn’t say anything about them as a culture other than they don’t see a lot of cars.”

Instead he got shots of a village elder in celebration—“This was a big deal! They’ve been living in that village for generations, and they finally just got clean water!”—wearing paper cut like a folded handkerchief in his suit jacket, or of village bands on homemade three-stringed guitars (whose field recordings will be part of Wignall’s exhibit) or of primordial trees tangling over the only road, or of the celebration dinner being prepared—chicken on the coals and the chef with a knife bright in his teeth. (“You eat and do a chaser of Cipro, an intestinal antibiotic,” he says. “I held out for two days and all of a sudden I felt myself get feverish and start shaking—but I didn’t stop shooting the whole time.”) And strapped to the top of the expedition land cruiser, driving through the bush with four hitchhikers they’d let attach, he remembers a moment of what he was looking for: “At that point,” he says, “I felt freedom.”

He flew home with Vanity Fair’s Africa issue in the in-flight magazine pocket. Infuriating, he smiles: “Jay-Z was featured because he combined his resources with those of MTV and they sent down a film crew and got together with the U.N.—Jay-Z, MTV and the U.N. with the combined buying power of God himself, and they put one well in one village. That’s awesome and I don’t want to criticize, but Water Wells for Africa puts them in for $5,000. The whole thing. If MTV, Jay-Z and the U.N. wanted to solve the Malawi water problem, they could do it tomorrow.”

Wignall and OCPAC’s Ashley Eckenweiler—the longtime OC music supporter who put Sonic Youth at the Orange County Museum of Art—put together Thursday’s benefit, which features Cold War Kids (with no support acts) and Wignall’s Malawi photos in the OCPAC lobby. All proceeds go to Water Wells for Africa. (“And if someone wants to cut a check for $5,000,” says Wignall, “we’ll scratch their name in the cement and take a picture.”) It’s the first time he’s publicly exhibited his Africa photos—part of the new and more urgent work he’s found himself doing since he came home. Coming back, he says, puts a thing in you. His two weeks in Africa pushed him back into the America he saw in Adams’ black-rag photo—he started learning folk songs, he says, because he realized he didn’t know any, and he realized that’s all he heard in Africa.

“It was a big step towards kind of losing my misanthropy,” he says now. “You can look at the world as the worst place, or you can look at it and just         . . . not with rose-colored glasses, but learn to enjoy life and people! You can find your own little world and culture within your friends and make that into something. It’s funny to look back. The more I start thinking about it—it’s so fresh when you’re sitting there on the plane coming back, and the further away you get, you kind of forget. And at the end of the day, I don’t want to forget. I want to stay motivated to make myself different—make myself better. Care more about people. And whatever else there is.”

THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF MATT WIGNALL FOR WATER WELLS FOR AFRICA WITH COLD WAR KIDS PLUS DJS NEIL CLEMMONS AND MATT O’BRIEN ORANGE COUNTY PERFORMING ARTS CENTER | 600 TOWN CENTER DR | COSTA MESA 92626 | OCPAC.ORG | THURS 7:30PM | SOLD OUT | ALL AGES | SEMI-FORMAL ATTIRE | VISIT WATER WELLS FOR AFRICA AT WATERWELLSFORAFRICA.COM

Tags: cold war kids, malawi, matt wignall, ocpac, philanthropy, photography, water wells for africa