2320 2nd Avenue North: Urban Standard

Of all the options I weighed for how to spend my last January of college, this wasn’t one of them. I could have taken a class. I could have worked. Instead I flew 19 hours in an airplane and landed in the center of an international news story. Kenya’s most terrible crisis since independence was brewing, and I happened to land in the country with cameras and an audio recorder. I was on my way to Southern Sudan to document the work of some pastors there, but suddenly my plans had changed.  I would get into Sudan, eventually. For the moment, though, the story was under my feet.

During the month of January I watched Nairobi erupt, and the pictures I brought back with me tell the story of the people that were left to sweep up the ashes. From the streets of the slums to the arid landscape of a refugee camp, I was able to bear witness to a rapidly spreading fire. There were literal flames – literal houses and shops and cars and people that were burned down to ash. But it was a figurative fire that I tried to capture in these pictures. It was, and is, one of tribal divisions and ethnic hatreds, of power struggles and wealth hoarding that so many countries in Africa are currently facing. It is a story of a nation coping with abandonment – from their leaders, from their neighbors, from their world, and, as many would see it, from their God.

My hope as an artist is that I can somehow show people the faces of those who feel forgotten. I want you to look hard at these people. Look into them. Consider the relationship you have to them. Perhaps you’ll discover a connection. I try to photograph the world the way my subjects see it, so that in a sense you the viewer can stand beside the subject for a moment. I take pictures as I see them happening. They are like visual thoughts that I piece together. I’m still piecing these thoughts. My hope is that you’ll join me in the process.