Faces and Facades

Faces and Facades: London, Kenya, Israel

England, Kenya, Israel. Three continents, three cultures, three weeks.

While my work in these places was to photograph those I was there to serve (a medical relief team), my eye was constantly drawn to the local faces and façades.

Whether in Kenya, where the mud structures that have been built for millenia may begin to crumble in a few years; or London, where history crowds each street with magnificent stonework; or Israel, where rubble and ruins signify over 5000 years of culture; wherever you turn you see the texture of civilization.

In among these vestiges of the past, faces reveal themselves: at Hell’s Gate, in Ceasarea Philippi, the adolescent children of a kibbutz giggle and run rampant. In the slums of Eldoret, a woman caring for poor children speaks softly of her endeavors as she shows me her tiny schoolhouse. In Covington Garden, a young girl peers through the crowd at a street performer’s shtick.

While this is a disparate collection of images, there is the common element of the present interacting with the past: my feet on the Roman mosaic of Bet She’an, or a Kalingen elder draped in furs, or a Jewish man at the Wailing Wall with tallit and phylacteries talking on his cell phone. Past and present, stone and flesh, young and old, faces and façades.

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