Niger
Typical scene of an African alfresco kitchen Cooking for the family and selling on the street Giving away food for the street kids An organized bric-a-brac of colorful kitchen wares The poetry of a scene from the simple everyday life People may be poor by ‘western’ standards, but not proletary Photo Hugh Ardoin Africa by […]
The man in the tin shed has great expectations Selling his wares to customers with even bigger dreams Bright blue shining wheelbarrows sleek like airplanes Spools of galvanized steel wire long enough to fence your world Top-up cards for the lonely hearts and the penniless Photo Hugh Ardoin Africa by any Means Necessary Gallery Hits: […]
Sitting on his roadside throne among his entourage The King of Hubcaps sells his shiny plastic wares It is for the blind to behold, all that shines is not gold The king and his army wait for the subject’s penny Photo Hugh Ardoin The Niamey Streets Gallery Hits: 9
The midday sun has emptied the streets from their usual dwellers Two young boys defy the heat to play a table football game Youth is lured by big hopes to become a football star or a pop star The rags to riches dream is peddled by the happy few as a pacifier And the false […]
Like moths racing against the coming night A helmeted couple ride their moped into the sunset The clouds turn indigo and pink before the blackout The planet is red and ocher with some occasional green spots The colors of the couple’s outfits perfectly match the scene Photo Hugh Ardoin Niamey Dusk and Dust Gallery Hits: […]
As the day grows eager to leave, so does this woman waiting for a cab Niamey communal taxis are five-seat minibuses following whimsical routes Living-dead contraptions escaped from a scrapyard driven on a licence from Hell For a penny or less you get the once in a lifetime experience of the African Luna Park rides […]
The unchanging times at the place where I live Time is like the wind, it sweeps across the majestic landscape and over the horizon It leaves the creases in the rocks the waves in the sand and shapes the trees to its whims The cows walk home, almost flying in a cloud of dust, they […]
From the far edge of reality starts another reality We sit watching sunset and replay our sugar-coated dreams Along Sunset Boulevards in some faraway place Pink stars lie on the floor calling strange names In the desert the stars still hang from the sky above in their own name And the magic moment of eerie […]
In Susan Sontag’s world of words and images Photographs are the past of present and more specifically “Found objects and unpremeditated slices of life” Now that the sun has set over Niamey is already past But it is a surreal future for the viewers to come Beauty is the object as well as the essence […]
As the end of the day grows near, a young lady walks by proudly ignoring the butcher Until someone gets hungry the butchers are generally shunned This comes from an old West African tradition, before the Egyptian dynasties Where Butchers, blacksmiths and minstrels altogether Form part of a special “lower caste” of free people Photo […]