Ulrike Leyens: Tamiga

In 1999 Ulrike Leyens stayed with the people of Tamiga, a village north of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. There the Mossi tribe survive in a harsh savannah climate of eight dry months and four rainy months, but they are happy with their traditional way of life, although it is coming under the influence of western culture. In these portraits and landscapes, Leyens captures the sense of place and tradition. It is hoped that the exhibition will form the basis for a project leading to an exchange of photographic work between schools in Ross-on-Wye (John Kyrle High School) and Tamiga, called "On the Line" (the line is the Greenwich Meridian passing through both the UK and Burkina Faso).

Ulrike Leyens has worked as an assistant photographer in Germany since 1993 and then studied photography at University of Applied sciences Bielefeld, Germany in 1994. She then attended the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia on an exchange of Student Master of Fine Art between 1996 - 1997. In 1999 she stayed in a small village called Tamiga in Burkina Faso in the middle of the dry savanna, where she photographed the people together with the landscape and created a photographic essay representing the overwhelming experience of her stay