What is it that places like this make me feel so strongly, that I am continuously looking for it? I’ve experienced countless situations of this kind on my travels, I have seen many times in the faces of children the joy of discovering a new game, the desire to immediately dive in the water to jump on my board. On each occasion it was a fantastic experience. But here in Angola there is something more. What I bought back with me from Angola is not simply the nice memory of a few spontaneous encounters with local people and the sense of mutual personal growth that comes from such encounters. For the first time I felt the deep agony of a country lost between two worlds, where the poor have nothing while the rich live in the most outrageous pageantry: confronted with this one cannot remain passive. Maybe I understood why fate put Angola on my path. Perhaps it was to make me understand that in order to make sense of all this, one has to act instead of just documenting. As a travel photographer I am conditioned to think that the very act of documenting a situation is enough to change something in the world. Angola taught me that it is not enough.
