Algeria

In retrospect of the times we are in with the resurfacing of such troubling events within conflict among the Middle Eastern and African Regions I chose to submit a Photo Essay  called " Safe Zones " from a trip to Algeria Africa. I was invited by a group called SEEDS Active Citizens partnered with The British Council, to document the Algerian people's lifestyle which I focused on isolated villages and suburban life, with intent to reveal a vast range of cultures to educate, create awareness, and to promote a cultural understanding.
Steering clear from major cities and towns, i am able to capture real life and forgotten cultures and subcultures often hidden in built up metropolis. 

 

Documenting this project has stirred up a panorama of emotions inside me.  The significance of which i only recognized after the event upon viewing the photographs.  

As a child growing up during the troubles in Ireland, i could not have imagined that many years later, my chosen field in photography may lead me in to certain situations that may portray an element of danger.

 

The local residents i captured on print went about their daily business, as if the disturbance happening around them was actually happening on a parallel universe.  

Maybe they have become blind to prevent their memories from propelling them back to a time that could involve the destruction of a communal ethos of survival, a time of little or no control.  

Thought creates our psychological experience, and thus we live at times in a separate reality.  

I read once that behavioral psychology is a theory of learning based upon the idea that all behaviors are acquired through conditioning, and conditioning occurs through interaction with the environment.  

 

Photographing this project has lead me to believe that one of the ways of how a person can live amongst an assumed never ending conflict, living on a day to day basis with an uncertainty of what's around the next corner, is through an instinct that sets in, to just get on with life.  To adapt.  

As humans we are amazing resilient creatures.  We live accordingly to our reality.  In a way, our behavior, our blindness to certain situations in some ways, normalizes our communities. Psychology of the mind begins with deceptively simple postulates. 

Without such a fact, the world would be black or white, by which i mean, to stay indoors, or to go out and live.

 

The purpose of the Active Citizens program is to connect the local with the global. We are developing the lessons from local communities in this city to a wider audience on a global stage and the work that SEEDS and other local partners are doing are having a major contribution to the development work of other groups in different parts of the globe."

 *Promoting cultural understanding between and within different countries and communities.  

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