Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Puku Story Festival - Part Two: Story-Telling

In February, 2015 I was privileged enough to be asked to photograph Grahamstown's Puku Story Festival - a festival aimed at promoting the telling, writing, publishing and reading of stories in isiXhosa. This is part two of my experience of the festival.



Stories. They fill our minds with wonder and open new worlds for our imaginations to explore. They show us our own world in a way that we had never quite seen it. Whether they're meant for the young or the old, stories allow us to both escape from the world and to find our place in it.

The Puku Story Festival celebrates stories of all forms - sung, spoken, written and acted. It embraces stories that have been written, and encourages the writing of them. It encourages those with a voice to use it in whatever way they can to tell their own stories, and more than anything, it encourages them to tell those stories in their own tongue, and in their own way.

Those who follow this blog may know that I have a tendency to tell stories through photography and explain them through words. I don't want to explain too much today. I think I'll just let the photographs tell their own story of the wonderful Puku Story Festival that I was privileged to be a part of.