How did you come about the idea of making “Hope”?
“Well, the idea had been simmering in the back of my head for quite a while. I had been following the American presidential election for quite some time and American politics for more than a decade. However, I didn’t just want to make an endorsement of a certain candidate.”

“In the Spring I was on a trip in South Africa in the north western province of Limpopo and one late afternoon when we where going out for a game drive we passed this little town called “Hope”. It has two houses and an airstrip. That’s it. And that is when the idea really came to life. Sometimes as a photographer you have to wait a long time for the right lighting, get the exposure right and find just the right angle. Here, I just lucky right away. When I returned home to edit the pictures I realized that they could not tell the story alone that I wanted to portray. I then thought of combining them with some paintings I had made to get a more creative look.”

Where did you find the quotes that is used?
“The idea of the quotes came back in January when I was in Washington D.C and then happened to attend a campaign event for the Senator from the state of Illinois Barack Obama. It is no secret that he has a soaring rhetoric and listing to his speeches was something very different to what I had heard before. That night, he lost in New Hampshire to his opponent, but it was also the night where he made the speech that is now omnipresent in the form of the YouTube video ‘Yes We Can’. Other quotes are taken from his victory speech in Iowa where he won the first primary of the season and his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 when he was first introduced on the national stage. Later in February I was back in Washington D.C and attended another rally the weekend before the Potomac Primaries . He won them all, and it was there that I thought for the first time that he might just pull it off.”