Ali Greplova

For over thirty years I have been documenting a vanishing Africa — its faith, its faces, its wild.

I first arrived in Africa in 1990, by boat. Ever since, I have returned — not as a traveller, but as someone who comes back, again and again, to the same people, the same places, the same land, to document and hold on to what is changing, what is disappearing.

My work is not about a single journey, or a single frame. It is a long-term testimony to a world that slips away before we notice — a world of people and culture, of animals and wilderness.

The liturgy of Lalibela in Ethiopia: rock hewn into deep faith, rituals unchanged for centuries. The Himba and the San, to whom I return year after year, to capture an identity the world is slowly dissolving. And the African wild — from the great migration to the nocturnal hunters I document where space and silence are running out.

Since 2009, in Tanzania, I have recorded the artists of Tingatinga, Makonde, and other movements of African art, including the modern. Photographs, film. Many of them are now gone — what remains is their work, and their memory, preserved on my tapes. The time has come to bring this testimony to the world.

I do not photograph what a thing is. I photograph what it means — and what will remain of this world once it has changed. I do it with respect, with time, and with the knowledge that some things can only ever be captured once.