Life in a Uyghur Town

My Scholarship entry - A 'place' I have visited

China | Monday, January 14, 2013 | 5 photos

Henri Cartier-Bresson once said that we turn to photography because we cannot develop and print memories. Life is a running reel of such moments, and as humans, it’s our basic nature to place ourselves in the world by decanting them into stories. As a journalist and writer, my mandate has always been storytelling—presenting the details in life that are able to convey entire narratives in a single moment.

Today it seems that I can only truly get a sense of a place behind a lens. Stories abounded in every country, every corner I traveled to: the hardened knuckles of a grave-digger in Tblisi, the deep cinnamon skin of Colombian Wayuus, and the way the light hit a kissing couple in Mexico City’s Zocalo Square. I like photographs that make you laugh; it keeps us in touch with our humanity.

Media has become a commodity these days, and this opportunity would push me to plunge deeper. Stories are all about angles, and the trip would challenge me as a journalist to bring a better, different, more unique narrative to viewers—to let them be touched by a place or a people and to be wowed by all the things in the greater hemispheres around us.