Xemival

Long before he could tell the time by the clock, his grandmother taught him to use the sun as his time keeper. Early in the morning, she would place a bucket with his bath water under the sun and let it slowly warm up. After his shower, she instructed him to watch the sun's shadow as it moved across the room. When it lit up the front door, it means it was time to go to school. Sometimes after school, he would play football with his friends on the beach and watch the breaking waves. And at other times they would go and pick ripe fruits in the forests while being mindful of traps placed around the forest by hunters. Joe recalls these interactions with the outside world as the beginning of his appreciation of the beauty, vastness and complexity of nature and his place in that grand totality. After high school, Joe left Cameroon to study software engineering in industrial Germany. His work as an engineer in Europe illuminated both the extraordinary power of technology but also its limitations. Inspired by the different ways of living and communicating in diverse environments, Joe's photography aims to redress the balance of how people interact with - and respect the natural world. He does not seek to impose his view of the world into his photographs but rather capture and present the world as is.