Ngong Hills

August 8, 2026

When we arrived in Kenya in 2023, our first home had a lovely rooftop view southwest toward the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi. On many evenings in the fading light I would get out my longest lens to look out, beyond the few lights flickering on in the working-class communities of Kangemi and Kawangware, to the microclimate theater playing out over the distant ridgeline.

I don’t usually do straight landscapes but it was like the mountains created their own light and weather. Sometimes it was calm but there often seemed to be something stirring that wasn’t going on elsewhere.

Historically the Ngong Hills - now a protected Forest Reserve where hiking is popular - is a sacred site to the Maasai in the heart of their Rift Valley territory, at least before colonial-era displacement.

According to folklore, a Maasai mother had seven sons who were very close in life and were buried side-by-side. The earth rose up to cover them, the distinct mounds seen as their eternal resting place.

Prints are available here, in sets of four or sixteen. If there’s a particular single image you're interested in, let me know.

City of Walls

August 1, 2026

I’ve long struggled with what to say about Nairobi’s ubiquitous walls and what they mean for the city. I’ve been chipping away at these photos since I first arrived, the newest ones are from the last few weeks.

I like Nairobi and don’t want to do a negative post and this is really not meant as one.

But we need to talk about the walls.

Not just walls. High ones. Everywhere. I learned early on that anything resembling comfortable prosperity is behind walls. Often topped with barbed wire and/or electric fencing. Beautiful garden restaurant? Plenty of them, but you breach the walls through a security gate. Posh housing? Same. Shopping mall? Same, and your car gets searched going in, every time. Pretty much any new development includes a wall.

The walls are pervasive but generally not spoken about, they are just accepted as a part of the disjointed urban fabric. I’ve never heard anyone else use ‘city of walls’, it’s just a phrase that popped into my head and stuck.

To me, more than anything they are a clear and obvious symptom of Nairobi’s income inequality. Even as wealth has increased, it’s all for the upper (and sometimes middle) class, plus of course the sizable international community. A statistical majority of Nairobians are poor, with informal settlements (aka slums) throughout the city, often in close proximity to affluent housing and development.

How do you think that’s going to go? Especially in a city where public policing technically exists but is unlikely to help you in an emergency. In a city that is more like Dickens’ two cities, the ultimate crime deterrent - and social insulator - for the well-off is a big wall.

I would even say it’s a cautionary tale for a world with increasing wealth disparities pretty much everywhere. This is where it leads when you don’t invest in the well-being of ordinary people.

Still, proper stats are slippery and the actual need for walls varies depending on who you ask:

A middle-aged Kenyan guy tells me how bad crime used to be but how much better things are now. Over dinner at a comfortable Indian restaurant in a colonial-era estate, a Canadian expat - who came from a stint in Lagos, where she said everyone had a crime story - says no one she knows after eight years here has a crime story.

Then she told me not to walk around with my camera.

There’s definitely a tension between perception and reality.

The US embassy sends out mildly alarming alerts sometimes about worst-case scenario safety precautions. When you live in the expat bubble of areas like Westlands, Gigiri, or Karen, driving from gated housing to gated shopping and gated events, such alerts can feel abstract.

A young Kenyan photographer friend, who shoots all over the city, tells me he’s had to fend off potential camera-snatchers several times. But then again he’s on the streets everyday - both in chaotic central Nairobi and Kibera, the largest slum - so relatively speaking is that a good or bad anecdotal stat? And still he loves Nairobi.

Another Kenyan photographer shrugs and tells me the walls are simply for ‘controlling the space’, preventing squatters and such. It’s true that it’s not just about crime. With weak zoning enforcement, sometimes a physical wall is the only thing stopping informal structures from popping up on your property overnight.

Apparently the walls began increasing about 25 years ago in a city that was then more open but becoming more dangerous. People here will tell you, oh yeah crime used to be pretty bad. Like what some associate with Johannesburg. Maybe worse. Then they say how much better it has gotten. Is it better because of the walls?

The walls also create the zone where the two cities meet - in Nairobi’s ‘fortress urbanism’, the rough, liminal space in the setback between wall and street is some of the only usable common space. The informal economy often sets up shop hard against the fortress. A zone of contradiction in a city of contradiction.

Nairobi is one of the fastest growing cities on the continent. At the moment, all that development has walls baked into it for the foreseeable future. What kind of city will that be? Who will ever be the first to take them down? Recently we noticed a nice new shopping center down the street that doesn’t have walls, and has a farmers market on weekends where the wall would be. A hopeful sign.

Dispatch 6/26

July 26, 2026

I’m still shooting BW here in Nairobi as well as color. Here are the two most recent pics from the past week. Both are examples of going with what life offers, no matter how seemingly non-exotic. One is on the way to the grocery store, the other when taking our dog to the vet.

*Fourth of July gathering for Democrats Abroad, Nairobi (7/4/2026)*

This Expat Life

July 5, 2026

Greetings from Kenya. I’ve been back in Nairobi for a bit this summer with family and the doggos. The whys and wherefores are kind of convoluted, let’s just say our situation remains in limbo (IYKYK, if not, sorry I can say no more).

Could be worse, the weather beats North American weather. Or just about anywhere’s weather at the moment. Even with climate change, Nairobi’s elevation keeps it pleasant year round. No heat domes here yet.

Photographically I wasn’t really doing much at first but I’m warming up. Mainly in color so far, taking what comes but trying to balance views of the local Kenyans vs expat circles. There are formidable gaps that are often hard to bridge, which in a way cut to some uncomfortable truths about Nairobi. But mostly I’m just trying to bottle some slivers of the everyday flavor. It’s such a car-centric city but we’ve been trying to walk more, which helps.

And one of my favorite shots so far, from Fourteen Falls near Thika, a town not too far from Nairobi.

Nairobi, Finally

February 28, 2026

Good morning if you’re reading this as you’re waking up on Sunday. Obviously there’s an unbearable amount of craziness going on. No bottom. Multiple layers of no-bottomness. We’re in a tight spot.

I am posting and dedicating this body of work to a much-needed collective spirit of positive human endeavor. Anything that advances understanding, empathy, intellectual curiosity, solidarity, truth, creativity, culture, etc now counts as a war footing, a bop to the nose of the evil ‘kaiju’ we’re facing: war, AI, misinformation, demonic overlords, and all the rest. So put yours out there too. We need it. Trust the butterfly effect. Enough butterflies can win this thing.

A note about generative AI (which I do not and will not use, it can go right ahead and leave me behind thank you) one thing it will never do is what real photography does: move through a physical realm, navigating human relationships and interactions to capture authentic images of real humans in their real habitat. It will never be able to do that any more than it can repair your toilet or play center field. - Bill

Hard to believe it’s been almost a year since I left Nairobi after living there for most of two years. It feels like just yesterday we were debating if we should go.

If you follow me you know I was shooting and posting some pics along the way with my blog posts and newsletters (Nairobi Calling, Nairobi Contradictions), but I haven’t really put together the full body of work until now. Contrary to IG-era pressures, best to sit on it for a while sometimes. Gain some perspective, let the work settle, decide what it is that you got and what you want to do with it.

Read on or check it out:

Nairobi

One thing I’ve been hedging about is that I actually have two sets of photos, from Nairobi itself and from the massive Kibera slum in the heart of the city. I’ve tended to mix them. Technically it’s all Nairobi.

At first I combined the best-of-the-best images, from both sets, in a short portfolio. Nothing wrong with that. I’m proud of the best ones, they are some of my finest work. But then I took my own advice and thought about what the work is and what I was trying to do with it.

What I wanted to do is convey the story of arguably one of the most important, interesting, and fast-growing cities in Africa. That’s really the main parameter I set for myself at the outset (I used to tell my students “parameters will set you free”, meaning by defining what you’re doing you’re more free and able to do it, instead of being paralyzed by too many choices). Anything that emerges within that will take shape on its own.

So I ditched the short ‘look at me’ portfolio format, which allowed room for added more images that would tell the ‘look at them’ story. Jump to the galleries here:

Nairobi

Of course no city has one story. But sometimes lots of little story fragments add up to a broader composite. That’s usually my approach, like I did in Belarus over several years for my book.

And who is telling the story? Every photographer wants to make ‘good’ photos. But what makes it good? As a photo teacher I harp on authorship, making it better by making it more you. How do photos express your vision, in your way? What does that look like?

For example, I love symbolism in photos. Like the lead photo at the top, to me this one is loaded with it:

These are more examples of ‘my’ photos, hopefully inviting you to fill in the gaps yourself.

So in the end I decided it’s clearly two stories: Nairobi and Kibera. Or at least a two-part story. So I’ve made two galleries.

In any case, maybe this is not so much the story of a place but the story of my discovery of it. Which will always be different from someone else’s view. Which is what makes photography worth doing at all. I still mentor young Kenyan photographers from Kibera who are telling their own stories, from the inside. It’s exciting stuff.

I’m very interested to know what resonates for you.

I hope you will click through to look at them, it would mean a lot to me.

Nairobi

A New Cabal

February 15, 2026

So we’re ruled by actual demons.

I was preparing a long-winded, somewhat grandiose response but I ditched that. Instead I’ll just offer a set of photos as a rebuttal, a kind of yearbook collection of my own ‘cabal’.

Not the club of gremlins in the shadows, bound by complicity and depravity. Those of us who live in the light, who show up for each other, create beauty and life no matter the time or place or circumstance.

We shape the world, not you m-f’ers.