So, I went to Kenya, more accurately put I’m a photographer, a shutterbug living off a consciousness of an enduring brood, of which contextualised colonialism, at odds with the stream of my African, archetypal vein, whilst in Kenya, underlining that very same pulse throbs wherever I be.
Kenya filtered my passion for photography, stripping away the vexations of 4:35am rises, and 6:am starts, and 11-hour days grinding in the faith that this passion for photography, will serve as a creative purpose; aiding perceptions looking to reason life. Whether on a trail on safari in Tsavo East National Park, or watching single-minded vendors trade trinkets, while kicking back on the white sands of Diani beach, or sat in a house, made from clay and manure, as the village doctor spoke of remedies for ailments the ‘West’ has never seen, or simply observing the demonstration of an ex-colonial home, reaffirming the grace, beauty, tenacity, and birthright of a people, of which I was honoured to see, it became quickly understandable that I really do take pictures according to me.
Whether on the Canal Saint-Martin- Paris, or the ‘Brouwergracht’, Amsterdam, or the ‘souks’ of Marrakesh, or the hills of Ocho Rios, Jamaica, on location in Kenya, Africa, where the people freely dwelled in the undiluted freedom of “identity”, it dawned on me, on location here that the passion for my photography sought to excel in that very thing, to identify me; the person, and not the photographer, to witness me, in a world I’ve spent my entire life trying to identify with. Thus, even maybe alas, visiting Kenya, with camera in hand threw up these considerations.
So, I went to Kenya, as I jokingly quipped to dance with lions and cheetah’s, to sing along with hyenas, to bask in the graceful rays of morning sunrise, and to capture, on film sunset sonnets.
In the end I came to Kenya to breath, to feel that lungful, to wholly represent the exhale, the measure; the association, the intonation, the accent as “oh my gosh” pondered that the beauty has taken forty something years to see, ultimately, (quietly at last) it was the being that let loose a form of expression my photography has never done before.
The manner in which belonging, to the environment grabbed my focal attention, it was at that moment when I perceived that my identity had been able to be free, without the need for procrastination, ‘free’ in the vast sense of the word.
Questions answered- How would my picture-taking eye behave? What would my eyes be moved by? Why would I see what I saw? And though the initial idea was to separate lens from being, in my mind, quicky asserted was the notion that would not be at all possible, not when being, and place on the face of my identity is the source of my desire. My balances of my conceptions, and the emotions involved had frankly never seen that light of day, till this day. honoured to have basked in the presence of my focal identity.
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