Kipkorir’s photographs

by Ryan

These are photographs that I never could have taken. But an eight-year-old boy named Kipkorir, pictured below right in the middle, did.

I met Kipkorir and his siblings and cousins during a Home Counseling and Testing (HCT) visit outside Ainabkoi, Kenya. The AMPATH program employs dozens of local social workers to comb the ‘bush’ villages every day and offer the residents rapid in-home HIV testing as part of AMPATH’s new opt-out testing program. The residents of the particular village that we visited on this day hadn’t been very welcoming of the tests, but the social workers said that this behavior was ordinary, especially since they had only started testing in this village the week before. The residents needed to become comfortable with the social workers and comfortable with the idea that AMPATH was there to help.

I was working on a portrait series of these people during their in-home testing sessions. The medical personnel and social workers had spoken to us about a 10-15 minute waiting period that they had with the client between the finger prick and the time that the results of the HIV test became visible. It was a brief window in which you could feel the tension. You could see and feel these people contemplating their own mortality. Had they made safe choices with their sexual partners? Would the test come back positive? What if they did end up with HIV? How would this affect their future and their family’s future?

The matriarch of the family at first insisted that she wasn’t comfortable having photographs made of her during this time, so I stepped outside and sat with the children. We had no way to communicate – the children didn’t know English or kiSwahili – they spoke only their Kalenjin tribal language, which my partner Jennifer, a Kikuyu, couldn’t speak. But like most Kenyans I met, they were fascinated by my camera. So after a quick crash-course in which buttons do what, I let the eldest of the group give it a try.

Great photographs are made when the person behind the camera and the person in front of the camera share a bond of trust. I could have never made photos like this of this particular family. I was an outsider. And a big, white outsider at that. But Kipkorir was their brother, cousin and friend. These kids didn’t see a stranger behind a big intimidating lens – they saw Kipkorir.

I’m absolutely in love with these photographs. I actually like them much more than any photograph I made while in Africa. They’re beautiful, intimate, and they solidify the fact that anyone can be a photographer. All it takes is a camera and a trusting relationship with your subjects. It’s all about storytelling, and you can’t tell a story without genuine trust.

I hope I can go back to Kenya someday with a spare camera to give to this little photographer. Until then, here is the body of work of an eight-year-old Kenyan boy named Kipkorir.