Africa
AFRICA
The first time I went to Africa was in 1975 to photograph coffee plantations in Kenya. It was frustrating because we were nowhere near the wild “bush” country, but instead in a lushly cultivated series of hillsides far away from what little I knew or thought I knew of Africa’s wild side. On the last day we were there I hired a driver and drove south to Amboseli and photographed a pair of tall Maasai friends in the light of sunset. It would take another few years before I returned, this time to Morocco and later to Niger, Tanzania, Egypt, Mali, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and Ethiopia. Africa is its own planet, subjugated under colonialism and ravaged by despots, wars and famine. It would take a lifetime and more to photograph its mysteries, and in the past few decades it has stumbled from one crisis to another, savaged by poachers, ravaged by foreign interests and treated as an outdoor zoo by tourists. Yet in all its wild beauty and history, it beckons us.