Africa
There is a Zulu saying, “I see you with my heart.”
from My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan
It was travel to countries across the African continent for my work that coaxed me into learning photography as an art form.
To get a better camera, to see better images, to use black and white film, to print my own images, to know what I was seeing, to see with my heart. My first photography award was for an image in this series, a portrait of a couple in Zimbabwe called “Hands.” Africa, is not one place of course. It is many countries, and countries within countries. Photographs in this portfolio were taken in Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Across these diverse geographies, however, I felt an Africa-ness of place and time that I did not feel elsewhere. These places were beautiful and mysterious and frustrating and humbling. They were not my home, but I was grateful to be their guest for a short while.
I see these photographs differently now, two decades after I took most of them in the late 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. I always knew that there was more to any story that I was photographing than I could ever know. I was always aware of my outsider-ness and sought to engage a human connection with people I was photographing. I took photographs of who and what I was drawn to, met with a generosity of many of the people I met along the way, however complicated by history and politics my relationship to people and places might have been. I now have a deeper understanding of the post-colonial agendas funding the research that brought me to these places--agendas that were different than my own motivations for doing it. I have selected photographs to share here in which there was a mutual engagement between me and the person photographed.
These images were exhibited in several venues during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and collected into a small series of handmade books.
