 | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 1 / 23 |  | | Lake Turkana from Koobi Fora. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 2 / 23 |  | | Group of Turkana women at a wedding. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 3 / 23 |  | | The bleak windswept terrain at Koobi Fora on the eastern side of the lake where several hominid finds have been made. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 4 / 23 | | |  | | Turkana women wear high collars of beads, indicative of the expected bride price. | |
| | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 5 / 23 |  | | Turkana men with feather head dresses at a gathering for a wedding, Western shore of Lake Turkana. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 6 / 23 | | |  | | Turkana girl with a stacked collar of red and yellow beads. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 7 / 23 |  | | Food distribution shack on western shore of the lake. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 8 / 23 |  | | Traditional Turkana compound in semi desert terrain. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 9 / 23 | | |  | | Turkana woman. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 10 / 23 |  | | Extended Turkana family share compound, each hut having a different purpose, for sleeping, day rest, kitchen, food storage etc. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 11 / 23 |  | | Turkana women converse at Lokipetot Akwaan settlement. | | | | Reportage Photography · Turkana | 12 / 23 | | |  | | Arupe with her child. | | | | | | | | | | | | | Documentary – Turkana | Northern Kenya’s region of Turkana is defined by extremes: heat, distance, drought, and hardship for its inhabitants the Turkana, the warrior pastoralists of the northern frontiers whose name for God is Akuj, the Sky.
| These are Kenya’s badlands, famed for cattle rustling between tribes, and increasingly murderous raids as the availability of modern weapons becomes common.
| It is an unforgiving land, home of the most Spartan of peoples, the Turkana, who mock our comforts often making do with the desert floor for a mattress and rocks for pillows. | Lake Turkana, once known as the Jade Sea, is the world’s largest alkaline lake, and the area around it has yielded a spectacular collection of hominid finds, most famously “Turkana boy”, an almost entire skeleton 1.6 million years old unearthed in 1984 on the Western shore.
| | | | But successive droughts in recent years have rendered even the tough Turkana vulnerable, the death of whole herds of cattle driving the surviving clans into the administrative centre of Lodwar where malnutrition among children and domestic abuse become rife when all traditional clan structures and way of life have broken down. | | These pictures are part of an ongoing “work-in-progress” on Turkana life in the face of increasing resource scarcity, and the threat to the Lake itself from the large dams being constructed upstream in Ethiopia on the Omo River. | | | | | | |
