Photo-journal: Central Nairobi
Strategies for a visual but challenging city
Last week I spent a few hours photographing Nairobi’s CBD (Central Business District) with a young Kenyan artist friend. It’s sort of the old downtown, a busy hive of human activity. Since one of the goals of my ongoing Nairobi photo series is to convey what this developing African city is actually like, I don’t think I can exclude the CBD. For me, it was also a much-needed gut check of my courage in street photography, which I have done relatively little of here.
I’ve written before about some of the challenges in photographing in Nairobi. The lack of walkability, no chance to blend in as a white person, avoiding ‘poverty porn’. It’s visually rich but you’re always in the car.
But every city has its challenges. It was time to hit the street properly.
My friend and I met that morning at a nice cafe in the posh Sarit shopping mall. [Note: Which happens to be a short walk from Westgate mall, the site of the 2013 terrorist attack. But that’s another story. Westgate is quite nice again now btw, maybe more posh than Sarit. We went there for dinner the other night. But it is an odd feeling considering the carnage that happened.]
To get down to the CBD we crammed on to a matatu, one of Nairobi’s ubiquitous and somewhat…
