Nii Obodai and Nyani Quarmyne's Mission to Document Africa Taking something as broad - and, for many, abstract - as climate change, and making it a palpable reality is the task undertaken by the Ghanaian photographers Nyani Quarmyne and Nii Obodai. Mr. Quarmyne, 39, objects to a common, Western understanding of climate change: whether to buy double-glazed windows or hybrid cars is, for many Westerners, as tangible as the situation is going to get. But Mr. Quarmyne wants not only to demonstrate the reality of the vast, amorphous challenge of climate change as continentwide, but also to provoke a more immediate, human response. And Mr. Obodai, 48, beckons to a similar call - climate change and its profound and immediate threat to Africans. He is "entranced by the beauty of this place," sharing an intimacy with its culture and exploring its history. The two men are well suited to presenting a view of Africa to Africans and others beyond the continent. Their work - now at "We Face Forward," a series of art exhibitions on display through Sept. 16 in Manchester, England - is part of a burgeoning effort to challenge the conventional, Western understanding of Africa as helpless, diseased and war-addled: a continent of victims. "We're documenting for ourselves what life is and where it's going," Mr. Obodai said. It's documentation of Africa by Africans.  Mr. Quarmyne, who calls himself a "hybridized African," was born in India to a Ghanaian father and a Filipino mother, has lived in places flung far and wide - eastern and southern Africa, Canada, Australia, among others - and is based in Accra, Ghana. His upbringing - between the West and Africa - lends him a viewpoint that allows him to go beyond stereotypes, while at the same time giving him enough "naïveté" to open doors others might ignore. Mr. Obodai, also living in Accra, bears a heritage entwined with Ghana's history (his father was close to Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president in the modern era), and Mr. Obodai's work is a sort of personal communion with his country and his culture. Some of the work, for example, a series of portraits he took on a trip across Ghana, let him re-establish his emotional ties to the country. "Where are we at the moment?" he said. How can I translate through photography without being too literal? I wanted to approach it from a more poetic kind of view. These days, a documentary project of Africa by Africans requires a reassessment of how Africa is perceived, and forces the photographer to react against those perceptions. "At the risk of generalizing, I think that in conscious photography, there's a danger that there's sometimes a slightly paternalistic approach to the work being done, and as a result, that comes through in the images that are taken in support of that work," Mr. Quarmyne said. That work, widely disseminated in Western media, becomes the conventional understanding. "That also means that sometimes the issues are viewed a bit more simplistically that they should be," he said. For Mr. Quarmyne, knowledge of the issue should mirror the complexity of the issue itself, and to that end, in his series "We Were Once Three Miles From the Sea," he eschews the well-worn visual clichés. "I tried to create images that look someone in the eye and through the connection that's created - experience for a moment what they're going through," he said. I was trying to humanize, to personalize, to individualize, rather than get away from the big picture, the common stereotypes that I see. Mr. Obodai trades in more ethereal terms. His work consists of poems, among them, "1966," "Galamse," and "The Passing"; of portraits, in his project, "Who Knows Tomorrow"; and of meditations on what it means to be Ghanaian. But he, too, is preoccupied by larger concerns having to do with Africa as a proxy in global power struggles over the centuries. "Africa's history is intricately tied up with the Western world," Mr. Obodai said. And that responsibility lies on all of us. The frustrations that we're facing now more than ever is due to the encouragement to allow bad government to work and to endorse bad government and for instance Western government taking our resources from Africa, taking our resources from governments that they through history have endorsed. Africa is not a poor place, Mr. Obodai insists - why else would so many vie for its riches? "I can see that there's a mentality of confusion at play, but it's not a poor place," he said. Africans are not poor people. We might be making wrong choices, but we're not poor people. I refuse to play that poverty game. That's a choice we're making.