In faces futures; In photos present.

My Photo scholarship 2011 entry

Zambia | Tuesday, November 8, 2011 | 4 photos

I spent 3 months volunteering for a Danish NGO, who were building a school on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Zambia. I spent all day and all night taking photos and videoing the work. What fascinated me then may have changed with hindsight. I have hundreds of photos of construction, of the school's development, from a beach and a couple of huts to foundations for eternal buildings and lake side plateaus. I have photos of musungus (white people) working with locals, strange creatures and orphaned monkeys, endless lakes and colonial mansions.

So why are my photos here of faces? Because what all the aforementioned comes down to is time. The school will be built, local people's lives will be improved, but the fishermen will still fish and the children will still play. Things change and evolve but to truly see this, all you have to do is look onto the faces of the people.

This is why photography is my joy. It represents what we as humans, constricted by our own creation and decay, will never experience, the present. I can look on a beautiful photograph and I am in that moment, even if it is 100 hundred years ago, you feel time stopped and you have entered the present. This is why I want to take photos, it is why I travel and why the faces of these people, to me, tell a whole story by themselves. In the eyes of an old man we see the past and in the determination of a young boy we see the future, all frozen in the present.