It’s hard to personalize a story if the faces of its subjects can’t be seen.

When the photographer Peter DiCampo encountered this problem in an area of northern Ghana where most communities live almost completely without electricity, his solution was simple.

He captured haunting portraits lit only by flashlight.

Mr. DiCampo, 26, lived in a small village called Wantugu for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer. When he went there, he promised himself he would put his camera on the back of the shelf.

“If something was happening in front of me and I either had to be a photographer or a Peace Corps volunteer,” Mr. DiCampo said, “then I was there to be a volunteer first.”

But as a graduate from a photography program at Boston University and a former intern with the VII agency in Paris, he couldn’t put the camera down.

In “Life Without Lights,” a multimedia project, he chose to show people’s lives after dark, a difficult task from both the technical and the narrative perspective.

About 10 years ago, the Ghanaian government introduced a program to provide electricity, but the effort fizzled when funding disappeared. For the people of northern Ghana, no electricity means no machinery. Children can’t study at night; many, therefore, do poorly in school. Teachers and health care workers aren’t interested in moving to the area.

Peter DiCampo

Mr. DiCampo’s work was initially published in The Christian Science Monitor in 2007. At the time, he assumed he was finished with the project. But other photographers encouraged him to pursue it further — including John Stanmeyer, who will work with Mr. DiCampo for the next two years under the VII Mentor Program.

Now, it’s a topic Mr. DiCampo is exploring broadly. In June, he traveled to a small town just outside of Albuquerque where the community lives in trailers and functions without power, and then left for Iraqi Kurdistan.

His most recent visit to Ghana was in February, when he traveled by motorbike to four or five different communities and let the people he met express their concerns.

“They are angry,” said Mr. DiCampo, who speaks conversational Dagbani, a language of northern Ghana. “They wanted to talk, and they wanted to dig into it.”

In some parts of northern Ghana, there are small steps toward progress. In 2008, Mr. DiCampo happened to be in Wantugu when the town began to receive electricity, an event accompanied by little fanfare, he said.

Although the next episode of the village’s story — the transition to life with lights — is technically easier to document, it’s a challenge conceptually to portray the change.

“I really want to document the ‘What happens now?’” Mr. DiCampo said. “But it’s almost hard to show the differences. Socially, I think it’s going to take generations.”