Field of Hope

• Prize
• Photographer
  Claudio Allia, Italy
• Date of Photograph
  online
• Website
  http://www.claudioallia.com

True Colours F.C. was started in August 1997 in an empty plot beside Juja Road in Mathare Valley Slums (Nairobi) where kids used to play in a 7m by 15m space next to a hill of garbage.The hill was so big such that it was used as stadium seats during the daily trainings. Then the founder of the club, former Kenya Premier League player Mr. Austin Ajowi, came and saw the interest in football by kids around the area and started teaching them the basic skills of football and this was to keep them busy, improving their skills and talents and also to reduce the high crime rate, drug abuse, prostitution and child labor involvement.
He influenced the kids to try and clear the garbage hill in order to make the pitch a bit bigger. Garbage was cleared everyday and the cleared space protected after training and guarded even at night, to make sure that no other garbage returned.

• Biography
  Claudio Allia (Catania 1962) is an M.D. Eye Specialist and freelance award winning photographer, actually living and working in Sicily (Italy). Since early eighties he has focused most of his creative energies in the music field in quality of music writer and indie jazz/electronic/classical music producer, using his film camera mostly to document his travels and people. Since 2005, captivated by the digital photography technology advent, Claudio started to experiment with new visual and creative approaches into his photographic world, exploring and developing his knowledges in the digital editing field and spacing his body of work from surrealistic or conceptual collections/series up to pure social documentary photography.