Your work has inspired...

Dear Hector and Zone Zero,

I just finished viewing your online exhibit at zone zero about the Congolese
Sape. I just wanted to thank you immensely for that, your photographs are
so intriguing and informative. They are beautiful in every way, and I am just to happy right now that someone has contributed a body of work that does not stop at stating a negative fact and does not stop at aesthetic either, and certainly does not stop at bland subject material...

The Congo as seen by the western world has never really seen much positive press, and most often when westerners praise anything involving the “congo”, it’s the gorillas or the nature habitats, and the people just remain in the back ground. Or people just think of it as a land of “primitive” people, somewhere in the jungle. Or it’s the war… Early Anthropologists where too much in the “gaze” of things, too stuck in the othering of the people, at that time they probably could not even help it, but with out them, we would not have gotten a peak at what many African cultures were before the impact of globalization.

My heart always feels a little more firey when I see photo’s of impoverished African children and people from war torn countries, because most often I know the picture is being taken by someone who is white and comes from a place of privilege, and that is not to say the picture should not be taken, and war should be condemned when the fight is unjust, sometimes the only way to get that across to people is through pictures… But why must we only have that perspective! Sometimes the most interesting stories involve the everyday life, and there is so much more going on than just violence…

Colonialism started before the invention of cameras, but it definitely lasted by its invention, and right now as Im typing this, the affects still remain, residue that im convinced may never ever go away, although it may thin out over time changing in hue and tone, at an alarmingly slow rate or quick depending on your perspective, much like the universe expanding… I am an African American woman