Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
A Little R&R
I’m sitting in my favourite spot in the apartment. On the couch that I purchased in one of those moments of “I am an adult.” My feet up on an old chest that Laura Butler found on the street ages ago. Relaxed. It has been quite a summer. Emily, John, Dar and I started Little City a couple of weeks ago and I was so proud to launch it with our friends on August 13th.
The Hope Moment also defined the summer. Putting the show together, going back and forth to Ottawa, articles in Le Droit, the Ottawa Citizen, and 24 Hours, interviews on A Morning, the exhibition and back for an interview on CTV. It was most thrilling to end the summer the way it began by heading back down to El Salvador. I feel like I have made friends with the landscape, the smells and the towns. The progress in just in three months is encouraging and so is meeting incredible families who persevere. Below is a photo of Jermias De Jesus and Maria Emely the smallest children in a family that is struggling. Hopefully with World Vision continuing to work in their community by creating micro-enterprises, schools and other jobs, families like theirs will have more opportunity.
I’m glad for the brief rest. I’m headed to Bamako on the weekend via Paris. I’m really excited to share this western part of Africa with you.
A Thousand Stories
An exciting part of having a new site is that I get to share whole bodies of previously unseen work with you . I’ve been working on putting up galleries for my trips with World Vision. I shot thousands upon thousands of photos in Ethiopia, South Africa, Brazil and El Salvador . As you can imagine it is quite a task to sort through. The images above are a small preview of what’s to come from the Ethiopia gallery in the next few days. Nicolette and I were there gathering stories about female genital mutilation. The gallery focuses on the stories of women and girls as they cope with the harmful traditional practice. It was quite an experience to get to know these women, to be trusted with their stories and to help them have an international voice.
Neglect
My friend Ali tells me that when I neglect my blog she wanders off onto the sites of my linked friends. This amuses me because I’m often rambling about how I want everyone I know and love to know and love each other. So if neglect leads to community is it such a bad thing?
Some love from the “A” Channel
This morning my new friend Kurt Stoodley called into his Ottawa morning show on the “A” Channel from here in El Salvador. While he reported on our trip, a selection of photos that I’ve taken so far aired as the visuals! I’m pretty excited to see the clip.
Landed and Safe
Brazilian Dreams
I spent only a little over a week in Fortaleza Brazil but strangely I dream of it often. My memories of the landscape, the smells, textures and people are very clear. Often it takes me a few months (years!) to revisit the photographs from a country, but I happen to be sorting through all of my photographs for my new portfolio site. I stumbled across these images and they reminded me of my dreams so I thought I would share them. The first and third are images of the Atlantic ocean and the middle a shot is of one of the favelas bordering Fortaleza’s city dump.
Cab ride blessings.
Yesterday a cab driver named Emmanuel drove me to the Norman Felix Gallery with my Kenya prints. We talked about how his brother was living in Nairobi and “Had I ever been there?” “Yes!” I replied enthusiastically telling him about my visit to the Canadian consulate and my misadventures on the bus ride over. He told me that his family was from Ethiopia, and when I told him that I had been there also the conversation really took off. We talked buna ta ta, injera, Abyesha, Addis Ababa, and the eventually the Full Gospel church. We discovered that his family attended the same church as my friends in Addis.
When he dropped me off he blessed me, and it made me feel nostalgic and hopeful. The experience inspired me to revisit my Ethiopia photos and I found this one. The man pictured is an Orthodox priest in Abote district. I photographed him right before dinner as the sun was setting.
