Waiting Game - N'Dele

My Scholarship entry - A 'place' I have visited

Central African Republic | Friday, January 11, 2013 | 5 photos

Working for the Red Cross I travel a lot. When I started taking photos, my purpose was very straightforward: have a record of numerous people and places I get to see. Very soon, however, I realized that my camera was a powerful tool not just for recording, but for exploring. It helped me notice things I would otherwise have missed, approach people I would have passed by, and look at them in a different, sometimes unexpected, way. It makes me stay alert, pay attention to detail and increases my sensitivity.

I think that now my photography is rather selfish. Going to a new place, I know how the place looks like, so I only capture details that seem meaningful to me, often failing to provide the necessary context for them. And this is what I am hoping to learn with this scholarship: how you approach a place when the time you can spend there is limited and your objective is to make people who have never been there feel they had shared this experience.

This, I hope, will allow me to practice photography in a way that will give people more than I take from them. By telling their stories, making them and others see the beauty and the ugliness of their everyday existence.