Rural vs. Urban
Sorting through the digital stack of photos I took in southern Africa, I came across these two which unintentionally bear a striking resemblance to one another. The first was taken in Bilibiza, a small outpost in the far rural reaches of northern Mozambique, while the second is from the streets of Khayelitsha, a massive township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. In their eerie similarity, these two shots indicate above all that boys will be boys across borders and worlds, full of energy, mischief and more often than not up to no good. However, these glimpses of two facets of reality in southern Africa also get my brain cells churning: Which boy do you think is happier? Are urbanization and industrialization the societal messiahs we so often claim them to be? Will the boy in the first picture ultimately end up in the reality of the second, dependent on cash for survival? Can the boy in the second picture imagine the quiet beauty of the first, surrounded as he is by a world of wires, twisted metal and diesel-belching trucks? Or perhaps, again, boys will just be boys, turning whatever environment they’ve got into a world of adventure ripe for exploration.