Silafando - a gift to you on behalf of my journey

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Photographer

JASON FLORIO
Date of Photograph

01.012.2009
Technical Info

35mm digital
Website

http://www.floriophoto.com

Whist making a 930 km circumnavigation of Gambia by foot, I made portraits of each village Alkalo (chief) I stayed with. Gambia is a rapidly developing country and one wonders how long the Alkalo system of local leadership can survive as the position is largely for prestige and unpaid. The portraits are modern interpretation of an ancient practice of gift giving by travelers in the region to Alkalos. This gift giving is called ‘silafando’ which translates to ‘ a gift to you on behalf of my journey’ . My ‘silafando’ was a print from the portrait session.

Biography

Jason Florio is a NYC based photographer and writer from London. For the past 10 years he has worked as a freelance photojournalist around the globe for publications including The New Yorker, New York Times, Outside, Liberation and The Times of London, working on stories that attempt to reveal the unseen and to provide an alternative point of view on people and places. At the beginning of his career he had the dubious recognition of being one of the last photographers in Afghanistan to photograph the anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Masoud in August 2001, who was assassinated by Al Queda operatives on September 9th, then to be at the foot of the World Trade Center on September 11th as it collapsed. Since then he has returned to Central Asia a number of times on both personal journeys and assignments. Whether it’s bat hunting in Suriname or searching for pirates in Somalia he is most at home away from home and immersed into a story. Florio spent the last 3 months of 2009 making a 930 km expedition by foot of The Gambia, West Africa to produce a series of portraits of African chiefs for which in part he was given fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society in London. The Gambia has been a place Florio regularly returns to. For the past 12 years he has made yearly trips there to work on a long term large format portrait project of the people that live in and around a sacred forest there called Makasutu - The culminating body of work was shown in New York in 2009 in a solo exhibition at Messineo Art Projects and Wyman Contemporary and the work won a Black and White magazine Spotlight Award, as well as garnering him a nomination for the Santa Fe prize. Florio was awarded the Joy of Giving Something grant in 2004 to produce the first ever assigned story for Aperture in their 50 year history, called ‘This is Libya’, which is now part of the permanent collection of The Forward Thinking Museum. His work on Afghanistan is in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, as well as a number of private collections. Between magazine assignments and photographing for NGO’s this year he is planning another expedition to West Africa to retrace the journey of his hero, Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who went in search of the source of the Niger River 200 years ago.