The Little Scientist

Sorry, we're deviating from the photography today! I'm off the lightbox for a few days so thought I'd post this little book mark while we're pondering the role of photography as a dialogue.

So today's post is a small illustration from a book I'm designing about a trip to Durban: photographs, illustrations and words about street kids. (Another image from this project appears in this post). The background to this illustration-not-photograph is explained in the text below, which is an excerpt from my journal. The face in the picture is that of a street kid who's eyes were leaking big, fat tears down his cheeks one day on the beach. He thought one of his friends had stolen his banana - one he'd been given after a surf lesson from a street team volunteer. I call him the little scientist simply because he wears a white lab coat, but his grasp of reality is far from scientific.

Working on my book spreads yesterday and thinking about those cloudy angels, well, it got me wondering about the limits of personal photographic expression. I couldn't shoot that moment with the little scientist, so had to draw it. These words explain a little better:

.......

TEARS

Tears from the little scientist.

Tears are not my cue for a photograph. They tell me something much deeper about a fragile soul who needs my compassion and tenderness, not a cheap shot. It’s another betrayal of the tough man image these kids will give you for the first couple of photographs, a reminder that they are young boys forced to grow up way beyond their years. Whatever the street law, deep down they are still just shaky kids emerging into adolescence with all the terror and confusion that this brings to a person’s life, both in their personal relationships and their understanding of how the world works.

Immense fragility.

.......


{Today's soundtrack: Gorillaz - Demon Days}