Change the world with photography
Can anyone’s eyes be so dark, yet so full of light? This is my very first experience shooting video. So I peer out from behind my camera, still rolling at 24 frames a second, to assure myself it isn’t a trick of the lens. The eyes I look into aren’t those of a bride or another client who has walked into my boutique photography studio. They belong to a boy, swaying meditatively back and forth on the blackened ground of Guatemala City’s most violent slum, “Paradise.”
Worn but brightly colored laundry flutters in the shaft of light over his head, flags suited to his 10-foot-square cinderblock fortress, a humble home that he now leans back against. His gaze pierces me, seeming glassier now than when the actual wall glass within my camera stood between us.
Here, where gang members can expect to live fewer than 23 years, it’s not uncommon to find a burnt or bloodied corpse left over from the previous night. Nathan Hardeman is a humanitarian visionary whose organization, Engadi Ministries Intl., we have come to document. He is tired of burying boys. He speaks of them as sons. His eyes grow bright with tears and with a deep, abiding determination.
