A little boy stands looking into the camera, wearing a smile, an oversize jacket and a single jandal. He is standing on dry ochre earth, and his legs are dusty. In another image, a nomadic cattle herder resplendent in a purple gown, black headdress and white tennis shoes looks directly at the person taking the shot - Auckland photographer Chris Sisarich, who travelled through Mali and Niger last December with a World Vision New Zealand team.
Mali and Niger, two of the poorest nations in the world, are being targeted by World Vision and other aid organisations as part of the Sahel band of countries in northwest Africa, where three years of drought have reduced crops by 80 per cent and about 18 million people are estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger and malnutrition.
The month spent travelling through the African countryside with the World Vision team and Auckland documentary makers Exposure Productions affected Sisarich deeply. "It was intense, the physical travel and the emotional challenges," he says. "I missed my kids and seeing a lot of these young kids who were full of this amazing amount of life - it was very inspiring to watch but then you know that one in five children there die under the age of five, so the reality hit home."
Sisarich, a highly regarded advertising and fashion photographer who was judge and photoshoot director for all three seasons of the New Zealand's Next Top Model series, says he was hired by World Vision to provide "some photographic component, to capture the situation and show what WV was doing, the need and the positive stuff".
"I shot all that but I was really blown away by the people. I was able to spend some time on my own while the others were filming and I noticed these guys a lot. We did communicate in a physical sense, smiled at each other. I asked them, via a translator, if I could photograph them. They were colourful, happy, dignified, respected and I wanted to capture a bit of that. I wanted to capture a hopeful side of the situation."
