I was born and raised in Dakar Senegal, West Africa. I
came to photography almost by accident. I wanted to be a moviemaker. Cinema
helped shape my vision of the world at a very young age. Growing up in a small
country town, the movie was really a window to a world that was larger than
life. A little town in Senegal would not even be the size of a village in
America. We didn’t have many distractions. Apart from football, called here
soccer, there was the movie. It was an open air movie theater that was sitting
across the street from our house. So at night, when we were idling, it wasn’t
rare that we would go to the cinema and just hang around. I was very artistic.
Good at drawing and later took to painting. Formative years I guess. When I
graduated from high school I missed a chance to attend film school in France
simply because the people who could’ve helped me didn’t believe that there was
a career in cinema. By the time I was in university, I had been reading every
book that I could lay my hands on about movie making until I saw on tv someone
who lived in my neighborhood showing on TV some ‘artistic’ pictures that he
took of Goree Island. That was the ‘click’ – watershed event. It really dawned
on me that you could express your creativity through photography without having
to worry about all of the resources to pull a film together. Gradually a shift
was going on in my mind and I started looking into photography more seriously.
PhotoCamel
