Yesterday is gone Tomorrow has yet to come
Roadworks have started, and an oily layer of tarmac partly carpets the dusty red track. Shimmering under the African sun, the oil trickles down through the parched rural beyond, to reach the outermost villages. It flows thick with promises of a newfangled infrastructure, of a new Gabon, steadily entering an era of prosperity and opportunity. However, the dark ribbon is eerily deserted. Snaking across the savannah, it is something of a mirage, ready to evaporate at the tiniest atmospheric change. It is a road yet to be travelled.
I was commissioned by the Gabonese government to document the country at this moment in their history. Its roads became my guide to exploring Gabon's journey between it's past and still uncertain future. Taken collectively, the photographs show a land of contrasts. There's a constant push and pull between the subjects these images represent and the wider reality they allude to. The information they contain is often ambivalent; is a bare classroom in Lambarene a sign of the country's investment in education, or a suggestion of how far it still has to go? The tension between Gabon as it sees itself and aspires to become, and the situation of a country slowly recovering from decades of mismanagement is palpable. These pictures function as metaphors for change, examples of recent improvements, as well as failures and delays. What is argued in one photograph is debunked in the next. These images are not here to draw any kind of definitive conclusion but act as document of a country leaving it's past behind and moving towards its future.
Traveling along RN6 outside of Ndende I came across an old couple on their way back from the bush. He is ahead, carrying a machete and a slender bamboo stick. She's walking behind him, bent by the heavy package she carries on her head. They have no car to enjoy the brand new tarmac road, along which they walk, not even a wheelbarrow to help with the loads. Whilst hundreds of kilometers away, in Libreville, I encountered a smartly dressed man and woman sitting on the benches of a flowery roadside garden, taking a quiet moment to read. This imaginary journey covers the distance between these two couples. Conflicted and fragmentary, it affords a glimpse into the kaleidoscopic reality of a country in becoming.
