Week 43 - 2015
© Sigurd Fandango, from the series «Africa's Decade», 2010. Preus museum's collection
Some of the workers of the Kenyan flowergiant Oserian show buckets of roses. Every day, they cut a million stems inside the many green houses on the farm. .
In the name of the rose
Rift Valley in Kenya is a territory where 50,000 people work cultivating flowers in greenhouses. "Africa's Growing Economy" [Afrikas voksende økonomi] was a series in Aftenposten in 2010. This picture is from the reportage on flower cultivation in Kenya.
Photographer Sigurd Fandango (b. 1986) has his own style in the documentary genre. He stages his pictures and gives much attention to composition and light. He works primarily as a photojournalist but also with long-form reportage, as here.
In three decades the flower producers have captured 30 percent of the European market. The roses the workers are showing here are a tiny portion of the one million flowers the Kenyan producer Oserian cuts, packs, and ships every single day by air to Europe, America, and Asia. 20,000 flowers from Kenya are delivered to Norway per week.
Photographer Sigurd Fandango is featured in three ways at the Preus Museum now. First, Wall of Fame is opening with pictures from his 2010 Aftenposten project "Africa's Decade" on economic growth in Africa. Also, he is published in the Preus Museum's anniversary volume in an article by Eva Klerck Gange dealing with documentary photography. And he will take over Preus Museum's Instagram account in week 45.