INSIDE THE MASAI MARA
Hearing in the news that the present draught is killing large amounts of animals in Kenya’s Masai Mara Reservation, I went back in my archives to find some pictures I did there in December 2006. A friend and I passed through the region while awaiting access to a NGO, where we were set to make some charity photographs. I had never photographed wildlife before and I was not set out to do it – but I could not help pressing the shutter once or twice when the animals stood right in front of me on these two or three short jeep trips we did. Most of the photographs on this trip to Mosocho dealt with the landscape: the sky fascinated me!
I grew up with the reportages of Cousteau … In fact I remember my very first dreamjob being influence by him – that was even before I wanted to become an astronaut – and I do not seem to remember what made me lose the focus back then. Maybe the spaceships did it. Today I do not know if I should be happy to not have jumped onto that train or not: Having talked to so many people who do invest their lives in favor of wildlife, you just feel the sadness and helplessness in the air …
Like most of my old pictures, these were made with a very simple point&shoot camera from Nikon. I had taken two of them with me on this trip. It was a time where I still thought Magnum was nothing but an ice cream. I had no knowledge about photography whatsoever and less even about photographers and their issues. This is straight from the gut as practically everything before early summer 2008, which also explains some of the wilder crops in here. I will go back to the original archives, that are stored somewhere else, to check on the original formats and replace these asap.
