Taken while working on villagegalleries.org.
I was taking pictures of kids in this Maasai village building pretend bomas, when I turned the camera and found this young guy. He simply froze, poor guy, unsure what he was supposed to do...and really there is so much about that moment that sticks with me. I didn't want to mess with it too much because the moment was pure and unmanipulated.
Village galleries is the organization I was involved in creating, we would teach the Maasai how to use the cameras we had donated to the local district office. The plan is to create some means of sharing these at a later date. Cameras and printers were used in the fields...literally. We hope the teachers we trained will find ways to add them to their classroom. Early childhood education is a hot topic right now in Tanzania, and we worked with Amani, a local NGO.
It was a life changing experience.
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Good photo, I like his expression, because you don't get to see it frozen in time like that very often.
As for the work there, you reminded me of Zana Briski and her documentary "Born into brothels". I hope your work bears fruition, and the people there will continue using the cameras and enjoy life and let the rest now about it.
wow Rob
I saw this in the challenge and thought it might be yours (for obvious reasons) and knew that I was missing something.
Poor little guy looks so confused.
This is the last photo that I'm commenting on in this challenge. Mostly because I managed to wade though all of them. It is a good choice of DOF, but I wish his face wasn't so scrunched up trying to smile. It would work better if he was more relaxed. if perhaps you could have had the parent in the background as part of the picture that might have relaxed the subject more. The more I look at it, it almost seems a grimace.
Nice photojournalism. It could have been made better perhaps by kneeling down a bit, you would have achieved two things: 1) you would capture perhaps some of the surroundings of this little child, making the photo tell more of a story, and 2) you would make the child look less inferior if you took a photo from their level.
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