Some of my work from Canada and Botswana has been featured in a new book called "We Are One" which has been published in association with Survival International. For the last forty years Survival has campaigned on behalf of tribal groups and the book celebrates both the diversity and the shared humanity of the world's tribal peoples. My images are in humbling company with work by Sabastiao Salgado, Brent Stirton, Andrew Testa and Kate Eshelby amongst many others.
Tribal people or indigenous people (I'm not sure about those two definitions) have always been an attractive subject for photography, from the early ethnographers, recording exotic sights and behaviour with the detached interest of a scientist to his/her subject. Old ideas of "the exotic other" have been challenged routinely over the years and today's photographers look with a less imperious eye, but there's still a meaty debate to be had about how photographers approach these kind of stories without falling into using powerful but inaccurate cliches. It's a debate touched on in an article in the BJP, written in response to the book's publication.
