I first met Arbai Barre Abdi in 2004, when she and her four children arrived in the US from a refugee camp in Kenya. Arbai was one of nearly 13,000 Somali Bantu refugees that were resettled throughout the US beginning in 2003. The Bantu, who were denied access to education and jobs, were almost completely untouched by modern life. Few could read or write in any language, and almost none spoke English. Most had never seen a light switch, a telephone, a set of stairs, or even a building that wasn’t made of mud.
After several years I began taking my 4x5 camera and Polaroid positive/negative film with me on my weekly visits to see Arbai and the kids who were living in the Willow Branch apartments in Clarkston. The pace of working with a large format camera allowed for a different form of collaboration, one that was much more intimate and personal than my normal reportage style of shooting. Soon after I began, neighbors, friends, and children from the complex began lining up for their portraits. Almost none of them had family photos in their homes, and for many it was the first time they had their pictures taken. One of the older women broke down after seeing her portrait and told me that she had never seen herself in a photograph before. She walked away holding her image tightly, yelling at the group of children around her as they tried to grab at it.
This series of portraits, taken over the last six years, focus primarily on Arbai, her six children, three grandchildren, and their neighbors of the Willow Branch apartment complex in Clarkston, Georgia.
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