#8: The Village

This work is shot in Pickensley. Pickensley is a very small village on the riverin Suriname. Suriname is a country in South America. And it used to be a Dutch colony and it's in the rainforest.

The village is quite hard to reach. First, you have to go from the main port, from the main town, you have to drive for several hours and then you take a boat. This fast boat, just an open boat made out of wooden log, basically. And you go for a few hours upstream, this village they don't have any running water or electricity or hardly any. And the people who live, there are the descendants of people who fled slavery.

Because back in the days, there were these plant, these plantations, and people from who were taken from West Africa were made to work there at the plantations. Some people fled into the woods, and they set up their own communities. It was interesting to see because somehow the very simple life that they lived kind of reminded me of my own childhood back in the village in Kenya where I grew up.

I think it's just so amazing what history can do that I could actually talk Dutch in the middle of the jungle in South America, with people who were actually descendants of Africans from West Africa. And I think that's just so incredible and crazy.

At the time I was working on my very first book of my fashion photographs. And at some point, I got so bored of all the fashion images, et cetera. Somehow when I went to the village, I decided to photograph in a very simple way, not staging anything, no tricks, just focusing on what I saw. It was almost like as if to cleanse the eye to really focus on very simple objects that I found in the village.

Actually, this picture I don't know exactly what it means, but it's part of a cleansing ritual. If people feel sick, they ask the medicine men to prepare them some herbs with water. They make this little square out of leaves, and they have to wash themselves within this square to cleanse themselves and to heal themselves.