a simple place

Ten photos for the whole year?  What was I thinking??  This is the second of two posts about 2011. The first part that covers Jan-June is here: “What was I thinking?”. If you just want to see the pics, scroll down.  But here’s what I think about them…

My work is in transformation, and what you see on this post is a part of that change.  I saw this trip to Africa as a trip to gather raw material in the form of images for new work that I will be producing both as part of the ENEMIES Project and beyond.  Some of what you see below are the paints for new works not yet made, some of it is documentary images I did for other people and for myself, some are just snapshots that show what I saw and what moved me.  So many artists conceal their process and only show finished images and pieces. The whole point of my blog is for you to see what I go through, how I think, how I edit, how I see the world.  This post is a lot of just the raw cut of my view when I was traveling in Africa. I like to expose my process, the way I see the world and this is what my blog is for.   This isn’t a supposed to be full view of where my work is going, but it will show you a part of the process. I think there is a risk in this, because the art world is so heavily based on image.  For me, I see my life as something of an evolving artwork so this seems appropriate.  I’ll continue to put up more of the process throughout the year, and you’ll see it if you keep watching this blog.

Yesterday I came up with dozens of photos from just the past six months that I love.  The problem is that I love different images for different reasons – some I simply love because of the image itself.  Some I love because of the story behind the image.  It always fascinates me how all of us connect to different pieces of art for different reasons, and I like to examine that process in myself.  One of the hardest things in photography or any art form is to step beyond your the emotions that are wrapped around your own work. Of course you have to have the emotional relationship with the work in order to produce work that connects with other people.

Art is about expression – at least for me it is.  It is about trying to understand the world, myself and my place in the world and expressing all of that in a way that communicates what I feel to others.  But I also think there is a fine balance that an artist has to walk here, because we have to express our view while at the same time being able to understand whether the work is conveying that expression on its own.  You must absolutely have your own vision and the ability to stick to your own vision in the face of being pummeled by the expectations of others.  But I’ve seen tons of art that fails because it is too personal in a way that makes it impossible for other people to connect with.  It’s a very fine line, and I think that’s the real skill of being successful as an artist. Perhaps the real issue here is building your inner self in a way that is intellectually and emotionally connected to the rest of the world enough so that when you create your own vision it becomes something that other people relate to or can learn to relate to. You may not think that this type of issue extends to editing and choosing photographs, but it does, and for me it is relevant as I move forward with my work and beyond the simple photograph.

Enough babbling.  Here are the pics – some are raw, some are sketches, some snapshot.  This is what I saw – or at least a portion of it.

My favorite… toughie, but it may be this one.  I saw this girl flying her kite while I was traveling in the Rwandan countryside.  It was just one of those beautifully magical, unreproducible little moments.

Rwandan girl with kite

After that I decided to pick one or two for each project – that made it a bit easier.

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This was the reason I went to Africa. If you don’t already know, this year I started a project to photograph people from opposing sides of violent conflicts around the world. You can read more about it on the ENEMIES Project website, and if you are inclined please consider backing this project on Kickstarter or help me spread the word about the Kickstarter with your friends. Here is the video I made about ENEMIES for Kickstarter. If you don’t see it below, you can see the video on the  ENEMIES Project on Kickstarter. For those of you who don’t know, Kickstarter is a way to raise funds for arts projects. You can become a project backer, and you get rewards for different levels of backing – prints, calendars, books from the project. You back a project with a credit card that is processed through Amazon.com, and your credit card is only charged if the fundraising goal is met.

I went to East Africa so that I could travel to South Sudan, the newest country in the world that is recently out of a grueling forty years of civil war. I also photographed people from conflicts in Kenya and Rwanda. You can find blog entries about them here or just go to the ENEMIES Project website and click on the blog link.  Picking one of all the photos I took for this project is really tough – really tough.  I like a lot of them, and the stories are intense and many of them inspiring. But here is one. You can see more on the ENEMIES Project website.

I photographed this couple in the village of Wanjyok, South Sudan. The man is Dinka originally from the south. The woman is Mysseria, from the north. South Sudan has been in a bloody and repressive conflict with the northern part of Sudan for four decades. Mixed couples in which the man is South Sudanese are rare for reasons that are too complex too explain in this short paragraph. This is one of those many examples of two people who fell in love rising above ethnic barriers that have been hardened by generations of painful memories.

Mixed ethnic couple in Wanjyok, South Sudan

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Grevy’s Zebra

While I was in Kenya I did some photographic work for the  Grevy’s Zebra Trust, a small non-profit that works to conserve the endangered Grevy’s Zebra.

I met so many amazing people in Samburu, the northern Kenya province where I was photographing Grevy’s Zebra. I also took the opportunity to photograph the Samburu and Turkana people for ENEMIES.  This man was the brother of one of the guards of the Mebae Conservancy – a community owned ranch where the idea is to manage it for ecological sustainability.

Grevy's Zebra project

Samburu elder

The Samburu people were so incredibly photogenic.

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Wildlife

I did relatively little nature photography this year, but I did a few that I made a set of prints from and these gave me an idea for another set of works.   Here are two that I liked a lot…

Cheetah, Masai Mara National Reserve

Hyena, Masai Mara National Reserve

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The Human Dominated World

Traveling in Africa made me more aware of something that I’ve been thinking for a while now.  The earth has transformed from being a world dominated by wilderness with patches of people to a world dominated by people with only patches of untouched wilderness.  I thought about this a lot this year, because in Africa there is still wilderness, but it is generally heavily managed and protected. Africa is truly a human-dominated landscape – much more so than I had imagined, and I wanted to create a set of works that talked about the disparity between what tourists see in Africa and the majority of the landscape. Here are two of those works.

The Charcoal Seller – this man lives in the Kibera slums of Nairobi, a few miles from the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage and Nairobi National Park, regular destinations for tourists. He has never seen an elephant and probably never will. He is holding a photograph of an elephant orphan from the elephant orphanage .

Charcoal seller in Kibera

These Masai school children live in an area where there are extremely severe conflicts with elephants. Elephants regularly kill and injure people and steal their grain here.  Children frequently don’t start school until they are much older, because it is dangerous for them to walk to school.  I photographed the elephant in the print they are holding in the Masa Mara National Reserve, which is about 40 kilometers away.

Masai school children

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Masai – Elephant conflict

One other project I did in Kenya was photographing and documenting the conflict between the Masai people and elephants outside of the Masai Mara National Reserve.  This was a pretty intense story to see.  I wrote a lot about it in my blog, which you can see here, here and here.  There are a lot of cool photographs from there, including the one above.

This is a drugged elephant inside a transport truck, about to be moved out of a heavily populated area  near the Masai Mara National Reserve.

Drugged elephant

Masai children looking out a hole in the wall of their house made by an elephant the night before.  The elephant rammed a hole through the wall in their bedroom, two feet from the bed in the middle of the night searching for grain.

Masai children in elephant battered hole

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Misc:

I loved this time-lapse I did in northern Kenya.  The singing in the background are Samburu elders from a wedding ceremony I was invited to attend in a Samburu village.  If you don’t see the video below you can see it here on youtube.

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Favorite snapshots…

I love this picture of Ben Ochieng.  Ben lives in the Mathare slums of Nairobi.  He lost his business in the 2008 post-election riots.  Since then he has started a crafts making cooperative, a school and a youth group to keep kids out of trouble.  Very cool. You can see some dancing by members of his youth group in my post about the artists in the slums. I am helping them build a small business to take tourists into the slums and see the vibrant arts culture there.  It is called Kenya Street Slam – here is the website I built for them: KenyaStreetSlam.com.

Ben Oching

Another favorite photo – one of the acrobats from Dandora slums doing the impossible. Also on  KenyaStreetSlam.com.

Flying

Loved this.  I was taking a picture of this newly born goat in a village in northern Kenya when this kid stuck his head in to look at my camera.

Kid and kid

Lastly, this is one of my favorite pics of the year.  After I got back to the US I took a trip to NY City, and I saw this abandoned rose in the middle of the subway tracks on my way home at 3:00 am.  I took this photo with my ipod.  It was dark, the photo is grainy.  I love it.  It’s a story waiting to be told.

Abandoned Rose, A-line, 3:00 am

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My favorite picture of me.  Got loads of good pictures of me on this trip to Africa.  I quickly found out that doing a self-portrait with someone was a great way to break the ice.  Especially with children.  But, this isn’t a self portrait.  It is a picture of me with a group of Samburu Moran (young men warriors).  They all carry guns in this area because here their tribe borders with the Turkana tribe who they have been in conflict with for generations.

Ok, ok stop already… that was more than ten photos.  So shoot me  :)

But I’ll leave off with this one hilarious image.  This is the son of a Masai friend wearing my sunglasses. His last name is “Kool” – so totally appropriate  :)

And speaking of children… go look at the photo on this blog post – “Hand in the slums”. I love that one too. I think I love a few too many of these photos.  :)

"We want to live in peace with the elephants, but they are crazy." [quote from a Masai volunteer for WWF who monitors elephant conflicts in Masai communities.

Driving into Transmara from the Rift Valley around the Masai Mara is a bit shocking. Lush green hills heavily patched with old forest roll away as far as you can see.  It looks so completely idyllic that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a hobbit wander up to me and offer me breakfast. And so it is hard to imagine the battles that happen here. A few days ago I came out here to Masai-land in southwestern Kenya to look at the conflicts between elephants and the Masai communities.  I spent the first two days in Lolgorien, which is just west of Masai Mara National Reserve.  I came here because Noah Sitati of the World Wildlife Fund asked me to look into the conflicts between elephants and school children in the Masai communities.

Elephants are intelligent, emotional and beautiful creatures, but they can also be extremely dangerous. When surprised an elephant will often attack people, and they frequently kill.  The elephants come to the villages to raid the fields, grain stores, and houses for any grain they can find, and they have an excellent sense of smell.  They move back and forth between the forests and the villages in the early morning and late afternoon, exactly the times when kids are going to and returning from school.  There are no school buses, and the kids walk most of the way through the bush – often walking up to 5km each way.  The children are afraid, and for good reason.  Several school children in the area have been killed in recent years – one was recently trampled to death. So, many children stay home out of fear or arrive at school hours late.

Masai school kid

All of the Masai land around the Mara is having elephant problems.  The human population here has been steadily increasing – people are making more farms and cutting down more forest, which is reducing habitat for the elephants.  So people and elephants are in conflict more than ever.  This  brings up the basic question that conservationists don’t like to address: can people and wildlife coexist in the long run, or will all wild animals that don’t mix well with people end up being confined entirely to parks and reserves?  It isn’t an easy question.

I’ll say this up front… I have always felt more sympathetic to the plight of nature than to the plight of suffering people. This doesn’t mean at all that I don’t care about people, but in my experience man is the ultimate survivor in this world, and our survival and prospering has come at the great expense of the natural world.  Of course it is easy for me to say this. Here I am tapping out a blog on a laptop computer in a country with an average annual income of $315.  Most of the people I have met here cannot imagine even what I am doing now – waiting for dinner with a middle class Kenyan dinner, drinking a glass of wine and writing this blog.  Simply by being a middle-class American, I was born among the fortunate prosperous few in the world.

Ray Bohlin, Photograph by Phil Borges

Years back I walked into the office of Dr. Ray Bohlin, an evangelical preacher and publisher. His office was filled with dozens of versions of the bible and stacks of the pamphlets that missionaries hand out on street corners. Dr. Bohlin has kind eyes, and yet because of our differences I sat down with a bit of hesitation. Dr. Bohlin is a pro-life, god-fearing Christian and evangelicals have typically been opposed to the environmental movement. but he is also a staunch conservationist which is why I was visiting him.

When it came down to it, we shared far more morals than we differed in with regard to both nature and people.  I had been fighting for conservation because I felt a need to protect what I saw as the most threatened and beautiful parts of our planet, Ray was fighting for conservation because he feels that God commanded man to be the steward of his creation. Still, when it comes down to it, Dr. Bohlin would put more of his energy into fighting to help man, and I would put more energy into fighting to help nature. Are we so different? I don’t think so.

Yesterday I woke up in Narok, Kenya, the closest big town to Masai Mara National Reserve.  I woke to the scratchy, amplified calls to prayer from a nearby mosque.  Below the hotel crowds of people swarmed the pitted and rutted dirt roads of the small city.  On the way out of town I drove by a cow quietly munched rotting vegetables from a smoking and overflowing dumpster next to an outdoor church blaring with the rage of a fiery sermon in Swahili.  ”What am I doing here?” I thought to myself as I crept my car between the masses of people and decrepit stalls.

Elephant damage to a Masai house

I came to Narok after Lolgorien, because the Masai communities around Narok have been terrorized by elephants that raid their crops and break into their houses in search of grain. We drove up into the hills east of Narok under a grey sky and stopped at a small school on the dirt road. Kool, my Masai guide (yes that’s his real name) works for little to no pay for WWF monitoring conflicts between elephants and the communities here.

Kool showed me where the elephants had broken through the barbed wire surrounding the school. They live in the forest below the school and walk through the school grounds to get to the farms up the hill. Later that day we went to look at several houses that had been broken into by elephants in search of grain.  This one to the right was the last one we saw.  In the middle of the night an  elephant broke through the wall of the bedroom where a mother and her children were sleeping.  It took a 50 kilo bag of maize and then went around the other side of the house and ripped the upper half off another wall to get at the wheat stores. In the end it took all of their food.

Masai teacher injured by an elephant

The next day after a torturous drive out muddy dirt roads I met a Masai man, a teacher, who had been attacked by an elephant two months earlier. He and his cousin told me what happened as we sat on a rough bench overlooking rolling hills of patchy farm and forest land. When the elephants came to steal his crop he went out to scare them away with a flashlight. Two left but when he turned around there was a large male still there, and it attacked him. He ran but the elephant knocked him to the ground and tried to impale him with its tusks. Though he avoided being impaled, the elephant stepped on his leg before leaving. This educated man said that he doesn’t care about the elephants anymore. If it were up to him he would cut all the forests down and “turn the area into a dessert” just to get rid of them.

What is right and what is wrong here?  When I decided to look at this question, I knew I was stepping out of my comfort zone.  I am comfortable in the wilderness.  I feel most safe away from people – surrounded by nothing but forest, stars, sea, meadow.  But that world only exists in patches now.  People used to live in a sea of wilderness, but now we have built a matrix of human influence that wraps over every square inch of the earth and wilderness exists in patches and scraps embedded in that matrix.  This isn’t my comfort zone, but this is the world now.  It is a human painted world, but nobody knows what we are painting. We are blind painters of our own landscape.

Kool's kid wearing my sunglasses

There are some possible solutions.  Maybe.  I’ll end this here and write about them next time.  ”your elephants”?  I’ll write about that too.  It’s complex, like everything.  I video recorded several of my talks with people who have been attacked.  Maybe I can get some time to edit and put some of those up as well.

Until then, the kids in Masai land are still laughing at themselves in my camera and pushing each other away to see themselves.  Even the kids that had been screaming two nights ago as an elephant smashed the wall down into their house still ran after me laughing and jumping in front of my camera.  Sometimes laughter can fly in the face of fear and drive it into the past.

If you haven’t already read it, this post relates to my previous post about moving elephants.  Definitely worth a look – truly surreal. You can see it here: moving-elephants

Me & the Masai kids whose house was pummeled by an elephant

Afternoon:

Crisp desert sky, thin boys asking for coins.
Looking through the restaurant door, one is sniffing glue.
He is the most persistent as we head back to the truck.

Down the street we stop to buy tobacco
for the villages we will visit.
It seems dirty
but they chew it or sell it
and there a life of 60 years is a rarity.

While the bags are stuffed
another boy takes me by the wrist.
I pull away, my fingers enclosing two bills,
but he is just pointing to my bracelet
that was made for me by a school headmaster to the north.

“Kenya,” he says.

“Yes,” I reply. “Kenya.”

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Evening:

The sun has set,
dripping down the wall of sky
and spreading across the horizon
into a low orange blur
behind the acacia.

One man waits with a gun
while the other tests and adjusts a remote camera.

As they work, the night is washing away
the last smears of daylight,
and the sky is being overtaken by stars
that are flickering into the hush
of the rising and falling winds.

Walking back to camp
I talk with the scout
about the city and the bush.

“Here,” he says, “there is space to breathe”
“Space to think.”

“Last night,” he goes on. “A lion called behind camp.”
“We found it’s spore here.”

I sit out to listen to the stars.
As the Milky Way floods into view.

I filmed this timelapse in the Westgate Conservancy, Samburu, Kenya. The singing you hear in the background is from a Samburu circumcision ceremony in a village in the neighboring Mebae Conservancy. I was here working with the Grevy’s Zebra Trust.

Day 3 – finally get decent shots of the Grevy’s.  Sorry, though, I can’t post them here yet  :)

You can read more about Grevy’s Zebra and how the Samburu and other people are helping save them at Grevy’s Zebra Trust.

Grevy’s Zebra Project, Day 2.2

You can read more about Grevy’s Zebra and how the Samburu and other people are helping save them at Grevy’s Zebra Trust.

Day 2 of the Grevy’s Zebra Project…

You can read more about Grevy’s Zebra and how the Samburu and other people are helping save them at Grevy’s Zebra Trust.

Just got back in from 5 days in the field photographing Grevy’s Zebra.  So many things happened, that it is hard to put into one blog.  I did a few vid blogs while I was in the field and I’ll try to upload some of them tonight before going off again tomorrow.  Here is the first…

You can read more about Grevy’s Zebra and how the Samburu and other people are helping save them at Grevy’s Zebra Trust.

I shot the timelapse below in the Ragged Mountains Roadless Area in western Colorado for a campaign to stop energy development there.  The journal entry is from that same night.

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The night woke me.

Her hair brushed across my face, and I fell from her embrace into her presence. I blinked. It was almost midnight.

I unzipped my tent and crawled out. I hadn’t needed the tent – the clouds were gone, the ground was dry and hard, and I stumbled as though the earth beneath my feet had swayed gently.

The meadow, cold and silent, was drifting through space. The pines around the edge were the end of the earth, and as I stood watching, a star shot past and disappeared behind them.

I looked around and saw the Milky Way rising overhead, shooting skyward from one large tree at the edge of the clearing, and I realized that this was what she had woken me for – to see her tapestry spread out above the meadow across an unimaginable stretch of millennia – a million, million dreams laughing and crying in silence, and here was this little clearing floating among them in the long flowing locks of night.

Hours went by as the hard ground tilted slowly through the night sky and we watched each other until finally she was swallowed up by the rush of morning.

Piano music performed by Patches King.

Starfall morning