In summer 2010, traveling across Canada I ended up all the way in Dawson City, Yukon Territory. I volunteered for the bi-annual Moosehide Gathering in the Moosehide village few kilometers down the Yukon river from Dawson City. The gathering celebrates and honors the heritage of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in people. A heritage that survives since it was taken to their Alaskan cousins as songs and dances for safe-keeping and brought back only in 1993.
When I tell about this, and as people know my ways with photography, they say I must have gotten so many good photos from there. I took seven frames during the whole 4-day gathering - five of them you see here - simply due to the fact that I get overrun by a feeling of exploitation. The same happened in the suburb of Kayamandi in Cape Town, South Africa, 2007, where I only took one photograph, outside the actual area.
I do believe in the power of photography as a transformative medium, an agent of change, as a promoter of dialogue, as a facilitator, as a very important means of communication in the globalized world.
Sure a picture is worth a thousand words - but for what?
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