Five hours later I got the shot. I woke up at 7 30 to get a photo with Cynthia for her story on prostitution in Kigali. We took a cab to a basket making shop where former prostitutes work for a decent wage. The baskets are then exported to the US for crazy high prices! Good on them.
Of course we couldn’t get a photo or interview with any of the girls there since the owner of the business had to leave quickly to see the president or something.
We decided to try Plan B: to visit an NGO that finds prostitutes real jobs. Many of them end up working on the farm (where my photos here were taken). Others find jobs as street cleaners…service level jobs, for the most part.
The portraits I took are of such workers, former sex workers who have been given new beginnings, and will tell heart wrenching stories of their past.
The biggest challenge in taking these was the time constraint and language barrier. It wasn’t exactly a rushed photo, but the location wasn’t as intimate as it could have been. In fact, the location was a bit random for the stories they told. Nonetheless, I tried make the photos revealing, but also somewhat abstract or ambiguous. As for the language barrier, the shoot felt like a game of charades (as to many of my shoots actually).
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