The Worlds We Live In (2014)

During a year long journey to Tanzania, India, New Zealand, Mexico, Guatemala, and Cambodia during my junior year, having a camera in my hand compelled me to think of the notion of “a world in which several worlds exist,” to borrow the words of the Zapatista fighters in Mexico.

Indeed, so often when traveling to faraway places, people take pictures of the things that are strange, exciting, colorful, and essentially different. However, such approach to photography and representation of the other can also mislead us to believe that the worlds in which these “strangers” live in are exotic, ones that are separate from our own.

This collection of photographs hence aims to present an alternative viewpoint of the worlds we live in: the ones that are connected, similar, beautiful, and evolving everyday.These worlds are places in which human beings, us include, live with struggles and hardship yet not without dignity and compassion.