In times when galleries exhibit things like “generative art” and the critics comment nonsensically (‘I find this work menacing because of the way the reductive quality of the purity of line visually and conceptually activates the larger carcass”). …. It seems a little retrograde to put on an exhibition of simply framed rectangular black and white photographs hung in straight lines on four walls. But that’s what I’m planning to do.
Last year a spent a month in East Africa photographing stories from megalithic urban slums of Nairobi and the refugee camp on Kenya’s boarder with South Sudan where 250,000 refugees live their lives in a vacuum of hope.
On 2nd June 2020 about fifty of these images will be exhibited at FortyFiveDownstairs Gallery, Flinders Lane, for two weeks. Selecting the final images is a torturous job. Choosing between hope and desperation, beauty and honesty and always trying to tell a faithful story with the full suite of work.
(The title is a quote by Binyavanga Wainaina. He was a short story writer, essayist, who founded Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya, and contributed to Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Harper's, Granta, the Sunday Times, and the New York Times.)