3/3/2020
Why am I equally afraid of living as I am of death? Why do I choose routine over novelty? Profit over freedom? These are questions I ask myself when I feel influenced by society, when I trade the impulses of my heart for the comfort of my body, or when I ignore the suffering of others to be spared a similar fate.
This small collection of images is a retrospective of travels during the past three years, and a personal diary of people I met when I challenged my preconceived fears, when I took the “be careful in Africa” skeptically. We all have an Africa in our lives - the unknown, the mystery, the risk - which we often keep to a distance. I repeatedly saw myself keeping this distance not as a child burned by a candle, who has learned about the flame, but rather as a domestic animal which, content with ever coming meals, does not venture far.
My initial instinct travelling was to photograph people as “others”, as tribes, as different from me, I soon discovered that what we had in common was much more interesting. These images are collaborations with people around the world. They are not meant to distinguish their ethnicity from mine but instead to show our similarities. This is an attempt to take apart the idea of otherness and to stop photographing people as “not western”, as specimens to be catalogued with photographic tools.
I grew up accustomed to the National Geographic vision of the world, the yellow frame creating a window into distant and exotic dimensions. In my opinion, this window should be shattered if we are to live in a harmonious world. The yellow window is a romantic extension of early colonial and anthropological photography, whereby the Western world studied the “other” and, simultaneously, strived to prove genetic superiority. This assumption has inevitably failed.
