October 9, 2011

Glenna Gordon: Elderly in Freetown



Photographer Glenna Gordon splits her time between West-Africa and New York. At the LagosPhoto Festival, her work about the elderly in the Eastern part of  Freetown, Sierra Leone is shown.
'I think a lot of photo stories from Africa are very positive or negative. Reality is never like that. I tried to capture a range of moments and emotions while I spent time in the elderly homes. Both sad, happy, proud, curious or intimate. Normal emotions.  You see, most of the elderly living there are lonely. Their children often died during the civil war and in Liberia, your children take care of you when you are old. In a way they are opposites of orphans. But it isn' all sad. The elderly are keepers of culture, they have stories about the time before the war, they are the people who remember.I tried to captured all these nuances.'

No comments:

Post a Comment