クリス・バーカードのインスタグラム(chrisburkard) - 6月28日 13時09分

It's complicated... You see there was a short time in my life where I wanted to be a photojournalist. Landscapes were my first love but the cultures I was experiencing in the places I traveled early on in my career felt so raw & vivid that I wanted to document them too. So I started to photograph people & learn their stories... in a way I felt obligated to do so as a storyteller. But at a certain point it all became a little too real for me & I really struggled with feeling like nothing I could do would really help. One experience that led to this was on my 5th trip to Nicaragua years back when I had the opportunity to spend some time with the kids of La Chureca. (Spanish slang for city dump) For a time La Chureca the largest dump in Central America & was inhabited by thousands of people who survived off the trash for their livelihood... 50% of them children. Many of whom were sold into prostitution & 90% suffered from abuse. There were a lot of factors that led to this extreme poverty & horrendous living condition but corruption & greed played major roles. To really get the full picture ( and details I'm choosing to leave out ) do some research on it. .
.

For me it was a life changing experience... I had never in my life felt more inadequate to help someone. Taking a few measly pictures felt almost irreverent in a place as damned as this. After I got home I remember breaking down multiple times to tears & having sleepless nights. It was an overwhelming feeling of inability to help that drew me away from this type of work. I did what I could at the time.. but this was long before you could easily spread the message on social media. I felt inadequate to really portray or bring any awareness to the story at hand from my own perspective. Needless to say I moved my lens away from social causes & focused on the places & issues I felt I could lend my voice to. It wasn't that these issues weren't important to me, it's just that it affected me more deeply that I wanted & the issues were everywhere I traveled. I guess being back in Nicaragua today after all these years has brought up some of these thoughts. It feels good to be back & do some service this week.

[BIHAKUEN]UVシールド(UVShield)

>> 飲む日焼け止め！「UVシールド」を購入する