Public Story
Striving for Balance
At this point, people had a less busy schedule with restricted movement, they spent more time reflecting on life, on self, and focusing on nature.
I was droned more to nature as I take my usual troll to work. The fact that there weren't many people distracting me from appreciating the beautiful color and texture nature had to offer. Flowers were the ones that mesmerized me the most, I could not resist taking their photos.
One day, I posted the photos on my WhatsApp status since about this time the main mode of contact and communication was social media, I was intrigued by people's reactions to these photos, and they consumed them differently, but what was more interesting was the amount of data I got from the viewers, there where those who enlightened me about the values these flowers offer like economics medicinal values amongst others.
Thus I dedicated part of my lockdown time to share with my social network the beautiful nature within my vicinity and the places I visited during the lockdown in Kampala and part of Wakiso district.
I was inspired to continuously go for the hurt of these flowers and share their beauty with my social cycle, in return collecting useful data.
However, I also noticed that most of the flowers I shot were mostly exotic species with just a few indigenous species that weren't elaborately or not documented at all on the online space. Kampala and Wakiso proved that there is still more the Pearl of Africa has to offer, and I intend to explore this opportunity with every resource at my disposal.
MOTIVATION.
The ability to capture and freeze moments in time to grant us an opportunity to relive those experiences is the one thing that later concretized my ambition to pursue photography. We live in a fast-paced world where every millisecond counts, thus capturing those precious split seconds makes a huge difference.
It is believed a photo can say a thousand words, this became an analogy that has inspired my work not only in photography but also in my practice of architecture and cinematography.
My primary motivation for doing photography is to tell time and record experience. An inspiration I realized in 2013, as I was going through our old family photographs. I am born in a big family of fourteen and brought up in a typical African extended family. As we were growing up, we had several events which were crown with photoshoots to document moments and share with the ones that missed coming for the occasion.
Looking at those photographs, I was mesmerized that I could have a vivid recollection of what transpired on those events and could even tell the period they were taken. In the ancient period people used to paint, tell stories or even write to keep a record, but I believe tomorrow's generation will use photos to keep information in a summarized form. Remember, a photograph can say a thousand words.
THE PROPOSAL
TITLE; RESTORATION OF THE BIODIVERSITY AND COMBATING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY.
Our ecosystem is composed of millions of organisms which has helped to inspire a homogenous way of meaningful living over the past centuries. But it has been noted that it is failing at an accelerated rate, which poses a threat to our planet and the galaxy, a threat I believe we humans across all these disciplines should promptly turn up to avert.But most of us are not aware of the opportunities we have in our mids to addressed these challenges.
SOLUTION AND APPROACH
The camera (photography) through history has proven to be a great champion of social change just like music and I am very positive this can be employed to avert the current threat our ecosystem is facing.
In light of the above, and from the feedback I got through sharing the photos on my social network, I intend to intentionally and collaboratively embark on a journey to restore our ecosystem and combat global warming through comprehensively documenting our indigenous flower to raise awareness to collectives fight climate change.
In our African culture flowers have been held in high regard. I vividly remember, in Lira, my village in Northern Uganda, during the plant floriation time, we used to rare chickens indoors, this was to ensure that the chicken does not eat the plant’s flowers because if they do eat it we would no pollination hence no harvest. For flowers are the symbol of:
- Hope the hunger will end soon, for after floriation comes to fruition,
- The hope of procreation for after floriation comes seedlings,
- Beauty is a symbol of beauty, to mention but a few
- Since we will be working with the local community it will reduce costs and ensure access to first-hand information.
- Inspires collaboration
- Easy dissemination and access to the documented work.
- Most of the climate change frontiers encourage inclusively and grass-root approaches as stated in, “The sustainable energy and climate change Act of 2006.”
- It will also directly or indirectly contribute towards achieving the United Nations Development Goal from 1 to 17.
Conclusion
An informed group of people has the capacity to change the course of life in a positive direction, with the help of the human capital and the media space, I believe we shall achieve this cause.
I also strongly believe the Young Photographer Award shall be a great tool to me achieve this goal.
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