humans and karamoja

i tried to get a Humans of Karamoja blog up and running, but it was never a big enough priority to me for it to really succeed. prioritizing it required delegating a lot of precious resources in its direction. it took much more than just taking photos--for it to succeed, i needed to do short interviews, sometimes through karamojong, but more importantly, i then needed to devote computer battery to the cause. in a best-case scenario, i could charge my computer sometime between 12:30pm and 4:30pm, if none of the 4-8 other people that i shared the single outlet in the mission with happened to be charging their phones (2-3 per person) at that time. devoting time to editing and formatting and preparing posts (in addition to taking the photos in the first place!) just never ended up being enough of a priority for me. i did try to get the photos, though, just in case. as a result, i have lots of portraits that are intended to be freestanding images that i never did much with (or that i posted on the humans tumblr/fb page, but which i'm going to re-post here for the sake of consolidation or something.)

here's a collection of these portraits taken between january 18 and february 23. there is a photo of a child who watched the lorry i was riding to kitgum in drive by. there is a child who stood in the middle of the main road as i walked by. there are men who tried to hook me up with nyang'i wives, men who objected to government policies devoting tracts of prospective farmland to serve as a protected wildlife corridor, kids who followed me as i took photos of fires, and girls who re-lived their secondary school days, and asked for a group photo. villagers without a word of english who hung out with me when my motorbike ran out of fuel. kids playing around a fire in central karenga on a mild february evening. kids in the rain and kids in the air. and kids who were amused by my efforts to photograph eagles.

for a slightly different selection of photos, with perhaps a little bit more text, feel free to drop by the tumblr blog.