STORIES IN IMAGES AND WORDS
Tribe
ONE HUMANITY. ONE TRIBE.
AMAZON JUNGLE, ECUADOR, 2001
FOREWORD
A
tribe is a community built on a backbone of shared values, beliefs,
and purpose in life. Our earliest ancestors banded together beyond the primal bonds of kinship in order to survive. These first tribes blazed a trail for the grand experiment we call society, which taught us to be human. We are now the only surviving species of Hominini — the human tribe.
Tribe is my homage to the human tribe in remembrance of our common purpose and meaning. It’s a meditation on who we are, how we got here, and on the improbable good fortune of our existence. It’s about origins and endings, about people, about faces that haunt, about the passage of time and nostalgia for an innocence lost, about mortality and return. The images showcased here have been meticulously selected from a vault of thousands of rolls of film and countless terabytes of data. They are categorized into eight chapters representing the stages of the human experience: life, death, and ideas of the afterlife.
Over the past thirty years, my camera has been an instrument to see into the shadows of the human soul. My encounters with cultures around the world and people from all walks of life have granted me with one golden nugget of wisdom: that there is no race but the human race. And its beauty stems from our sameness despite our differences. Every person has a story of love and heartbreak, of joy and tragedy, hope and despair. Everyone shares similar dreams and aspirations. Every single human is fascinating if we care to look and listen.
Tribe is a celebration of every one of us that makes up the human tribe. It reflects my awe of being alive and my thrill of discovering what it means to be us in every shape, color, and form. It is rooted in the hope that the very ingenuity that allowed us to come so far, so fast, guides us to a future connected as one humanity. One tribe. ▪️
Origine
AMAZON JUNGLE, ECUADOR, 2002
THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS
E
ach human being that is born is twice conceived: in body and in
mind. At the moment of physical birth, the mind awakens, naked, unformed, knowing nothing of the new world beyond itself. Immersed into a reality shaped by millennia of human progress, individual consciousness develops within the framework of our collective past. As primitive beings, our awareness was restricted to raw sensory data and a simple pleasure-pain mechanism. Survival in a hostile environment forced man to think, to reflect, to establish a figurative and linguistic understanding of objects, of differences, of transitivity.
Adaptation to external stresses stimulated the unconscious soul to evolve into the fully conscious, aware soul, and human clans split out along diverging evolutionary paths. While modern society evolved technologically, indigenous cultures established a profound and intimate understanding of nature. Today, their worldview is synonymous with the rainforest itself, and what may seem to us to be "primitive life" is actually a masterly adaptation to the environment. Their earth is vibrant with life and mystery; and in the depths of their ancient wisdom lie the origin and essence of the entire human race. ▪️
Pure
SRI LANKA, 2015
THE INNOCENT EYE
hildhood is carved out by sounds and smells and sights, before ritual
C
and maturity strips life of its daily magic. Each new experience, each new encounter leaves an indelible impression on a virgin mind. Ideas and thoughts, bursting with wonder and naiveté, reach up like trees towards the imagination; reach down like roots into the joy of existence. Though adults create the world in which a child enters, through innocent eyes, the rooms of an ordinary home somehow appear more grand, and the shadows near the bed at night loom in a more delightful horror. In the golden light of dawn, everything glitters forever for a moment. ▪️
Ceremonia
MONGOLIA, 2004
THE CELEBRATION OF LIFE
C
ulture defines our society, fuels our differences, and highlights our
similarities. Across vast oceans and awesome distances, along parched lands on and upward to the mountains, surrounded by the heat, the dust and the rumble of distant drums, every culture celebrates life by accentuating different parts of the same reality. Each defines its own purpose and meaning, shaped by particular ideas, values and beliefs, and colored by distinct rituals and ceremonies. Through experience, observation and inference, cultures and individuals alike gain knowledge.
As society evolves, culture is created and recreated in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow arduous process of learning shapes, purposes and values. Then, it is the rudimentary testing of this awareness through experience, and the understanding of subtle interconnections of details. Ultimately, the mind, as the locus of identity, bends the world to its own ends, celebrating individuality through creativity and self-expression.▪️
