Barak Bruerd

Dusty Airstrip

Posted on January 01, 2011 by Barak in Africa | No Comments

You might want to watch out for donkey’s at the end of the airstrip.

Barren Winds

Posted on April 28, 2010 by Barak in Africa | 1 Comment

Buried

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Barak in Africa | No Comments

Northern Kenya.  11pm.  No road.  No cell coverage.  No help.  A historic event with a full tale that can really only be captured by the imagination. I’d put words to it, but it wouldn’t do it justice.

Lutito

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Barak in Asia | No Comments

Not quite sure if we want to extract anything metaphorical from this photo… deserts, parched earth, wasteland, etc are never imagery you generally pair up with relationships, marriage, etc.  But we were eating lunch on this salt-flat in Marsabit and I shot this wide-angle of Kellie and Jeremy.  Pretty sweet if I do say so myself.

Nomadic Pastoralist, Marsabit

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Barak in Africa | 1 Comment

Oasis in Marsabit

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Barak in Africa | No Comments

Its hard to describe what it’s like to stand in a wasteland, surrounded on all sides by scorched earth as far as the eye can see.  Even more so, its hard to describe what water means to a place like this.  Camels numbering in the thousands surround this place and men wade knee deep in the green water lifting bucket after bucket to the watering trough.  It is a place that is at once both treacherous and beautiful.

Relic

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Barak in Africa | No Comments

Stumbling across an antique Ford tractor would be fairly blasé in Tennessee.  But in northern Kenya it’s rather novel.  And apparently functional as well…

Staying “in Africa”

Posted on September 05, 2008 by Barak in Africa | No Comments

In northern Kenya we ate breakfast at a fantastic little hole-in-the-wall guesthouse in Torbi where the rooms were named after places.  So I posed beside one of the doors that was most apropos for my work.

Homemade Toys

Posted on September 04, 2008 by Barak in Africa | No Comments

Saw these sitting on the tank pad at a school in Marsabit.  Children had made them from plastic bottles and sticks and were racing them around the tank during recess.

Desert Dusk

Posted on September 04, 2008 by Barak in Africa | 1 Comment

Spent an incredibly memorable night in a small rural town in northern Kenya called Torbi.  Part of Marsabit district, the area is the traditional lands of several nomadic tribes, or pastoralists as they are technically referred to.  The desert here is both harsh and beautiful and I caught a few shots of dusk.  The dome in the photo is one of the houses which bares an uncanny resemblance to homes built by nomadic races in both central Asia as well as North America – cloth and skins draped over a wooden frame.