a sudanese story

a sudanese story…

During Christmas break of this 2019, I was back down in San Diego for a couple of weeks. During that time, I had chatted with my oldest sister about her involvement with the Southern Sudanese Community Center down in San Diego. After chatting and remembering my previous visits to the Center, I asked her to check with Choul (the director) if I would be able to come down and document the space during their annual Christmas event. I wanted to seize this opportunity to use photography as a medium to document a space and tell its story, by incorporating my worldview and perspective to play. Despite this being a Christmas event at the Center, I did not want the photos to be about the gifts being given or received, but the people and the space. I strongly avoided taking any photos that contained a gift or wrapping paper that would point you towards a charity event or Christmas giveaway. Yes, the event that day was beautiful to see so many grateful refugee children and families giving and receiving presents, but I was afraid that this could be to cliché or even come across as “poverty porn”. This was not my intent, thus the lack and even absence of any such photos. My goal was as I previously stated, to document the space and the people. But furthermore, to document them as a window and a way that we can look into the cultural transition and lifestyle of these Sundanese people that are now residing in San Diego.

Many people may not be aware, but I grew up in West Africa for the first twelve years of my life. This gave me an even deeper connection to this space specifically, it resembled where I grew up, my home. This cultural transition in which I was documenting was not foreign, It was something that I faced as well to some extent. The transition that I am talking about in this case is the cross-cultural transition, the blending of two completely different worlds. This is what drew me in. Also during this day of photographing, I wanted to slow down and force myself to “see”. Because if this I shot primarily on black and white Ilford film. I shot both 120 and 35mm films with the intent that this would force me to slow down and look for moments, scenes and stories. To further invest myself in the project, I developed all the film myself, scanned and self-published them into a small pocket size zine. I still want these photos to speak for themselves as a cohesive story, I have never put too much effort into any project and I couldn’t be more proud of the photos that resulted. Above are a couple of previews from the Zine which I made. The zine is 25 total spreads and I am selling them for $20. I will also be donating 50% of all the money from the Zines to the Sudanese Center.

If you would like to make a donation, please go to

ssccsd.org/donate

https://ssccsd.org/

if you would like to purchase a Zine

Email me at

hello@davidardill.com