patrick rohr.

Kenya and Tansania.

Biovision Foundation supports organic farmers in East Africa in many ways: knowledge transfer, organic fertilizers, new ways of farming. In 2018, Biovision celebrated its 20th birthday. For this occasion, Biovision commissioned me to produce a calendar with pictures and stories about the organic farmers they support in Kenya and Tanzania.

I presented the calendar at the Biovision Symposium in autumn 2018. The calendar was sold out in short time.

Uganda.

Incited by radical American evangelists, political leaders in Uganda intended to introduce the death penalty for homosexuality. This was only prevented thanks to international pressure. But still, homosexuality is illegal in Uganda, like in many other African countries. The law is exceptionally harsh: Men and women who get caught in a homosexual act face up to 20 years in jail. Related parties and landlords who don’t denounce known LGBTI persons to the government are sentenced to seven years in prison. I travelled to Uganda on behalf of the foundation Rainbow Support Network.

Ethiopia.

Thanks to the SKY project, young people in Ethiopia learn professional skills in a three-month training programme. After that they can find a job or start their own business more easily. I visited this project on behalf of the Swiss development organisation Helvetas in 2017.

Japan.

Japan is a country of real contradictions – which are increasingly leading to impossible tension. The struggle between tradition and modernity, eastern and western living, protecting and opening up the country poses great challenges. The economy is crashing, the population dying off. A photo-essayistic approach to an elusive country.

Chernobyl.

After the devastating Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, hundreds of thousands of people were resettled from the so-called circle of death – an area with a 30-kilometre radius around the failed reactor – to anonymous big cities in Ukraine. Not all the migrants accepted this willingly: they fought by stealth to return to their former homes, where some of them still live today, surrounded by deserted and dilapidated villages. A photographic visit to the widows of Chernobyl.