I want you all to imagine something with me for a minute imagine standing somewhere far away from yourself outside your own body looking back at yourself imagine you're on top of a mountain imagine you're looking at the sunset you're a small little silhouette you can't see what color clothes you have on can't even see your face would it make you feel small and insignificant or would it make you feel more connected to everything around you I actually had this opportunity earlier this year I had my new toy with me I just bought a drone and I took it up to the top of Table Mountain because I live in Cape Town now and I shot this video that this is a still from I put it together it was an awesome video everyone really liked it I edited the video together I put it on the internet and my friend watched it and my friend watched it and he said to me you wrote me an email and he said I've never seen Table Mountain look like it looks in this video and that might seem like kind of a throwaway comment but to me it was really really profound I thought this is the most iconic landmark in South Africa it's definitely the most iconic landmark in Cape Town and this new perspective this what I call a toy is actually an extremely powerful piece of technology it totally changed how he saw Table Mountain and I started to think well what else could I apply this really strong perspective shift to this is important to me because I'm a photographer and I always thought that if I wanted to tell someone's story the best way to do that was to look into their eyes it was to take photos show people's faces and try to create a sense of empathy by looking into someone's eyes but I realized maybe I need to start thinking outside the box I live in a city where there's tons of barriers everywhere I live in a city where there's fences where there's walls where there's highways and specifically what interested me as you can see in this photo there's big open green areas where people have designed the city to be separate from one another it's very difficult to see over these fences especially if you're living in an area like this that's flat because we live at ground level we don't get to see this perspective very often we surround ourselves with people that look like us we surround ourselves with communities that seem like we should be a part of them we drive the same cars as our friends we have the same jobs as our friends our kids to go to the same schools as our friends kids go to their schools but right next door to us there's this community of people who live in red colored houses and those people in the red colored houses they have better cars and they have better schools and they have parks in their neighborhood and oh by the way their houses are colored red and that two-lane road that acts as a barrier to us physically it also acts as a barrier to us mentally it acts as a barrier to our imagination we do this for a variety of reasons I think we tell ourselves that it's natural to bond together to band together into tribes we tell ourselves that it's necessary for defense that were defending against an enemy that were protecting our families there's a whole bunch of reasons that we tried to use to justify why we like to live with other people who look like us but my question was always who are we defending against and who are these enemies when I went to University of Capetown I was really interested in these topics like I said and I found this map right before I did this project I was thinking about it it was inside my head this is a map based on census data and this is particularly Cape Town but there's maps for all the major urban metros in South Africa and it really struck me this is another way to look at the topic that I'm talking about tonight with data it really struck me how by and large people still live in those same areas that they were placed decades ago and they're bounded by this infrastructure you can see on this map behind you can see that blue square right in the middle it's surrounded by roads an industrial area a power plant and a big Greenbelt it's incredible how people can't seem to get out of these environments that we've placed them into and that's important because the next slide that I'm going to show you is income level also based on census data from 2011 there's a very close correlation between people's income level and where they've been placed throughout the last five six decades at least in the city of Cape Town so after seeing that video and after having my friend comment on it and after having all these things percolate around in my head I decided to take this toy drone and take it down to an area near Cape Town where I live an area called Nord Hook and I'd often pass by there and I thought it was interesting because there's a sort of a very low-income township area called masa boom la la right in the middle of relatively affluent housing estates and I thought this would be a really interesting perspective shift to go down there and actually see what this looked like from the drone and actually this is the cul-de-sac that I flew from I found this image on Google Streetview yesterday the housing estates in this area aren't atypical of South Africa they're walled in with two meter high fences it's very difficult to see on the other side of those fences it's also a flat area so it's really difficult to see very far or to get a perspective to see what's very far away from you because everything's flat so I decided to try it out I hooked up my phone to my remote controller I put the drone in the middle of that cul-de-sac and I took off and this is the video that I saw when I took off [Music] okay so that's the photo that I posted on my Facebook page later that night I only had 300 likes on my Facebook page at the time so I wasn't a very famous photographer and I put it up there and I went to bed and when I woke up in the morning there was 40,000 people that had viewed that photo thousands of likes hundreds of comments hundreds of shares I touched a nerve somehow and people were sharing this image like crazy and what I thought was really interesting were the comments that people were leaving on my facebook profile some of them were super passionate some of them were less passionate but they were all invested in what I was trying to portray here they'd all been taken by this new perspective looking at something that they thought they knew what it looked like the number one comment that stuck out to me was I didn't know that it looked this bad I heard that from a lot of people and I decided right then in there that even though I hadn't really even thought of continuing this project after this first photo it was just sort of a personal project I decided there that it was going to be my mission to actually show what my city actually looked like from the air as I like to say the beauty of how things really are becomes apparent when you fly above them so I went to help bay next if you guys have ever been to Cape Town help Bay is about 15 kilometres south of the city bowl and it's right next to a Township area called a Mazama yeah - and by this time and this was only the second day these videos I'm sorry these photos had 80,000 a hundred thousand views people were contacting me from all over the world and definitely from all over South Africa journalists other people I realized right away that this was a much bigger project than just Cape Town than just local and I wanted to go to the rest of South Africa so I very quickly within the next couple weeks bought myself a ticket to come to Durban and I took a road trip throughout the big metro areas in this area of the country so I went from Durban to Pietermaritzburg to the hotel area and the last photo I took which is the top left photo in this image that was just a few kilometers from where we're sitting right now the research that I put into all of these like I said I used the maps earlier I also researched on Google Earth what the actual terrain looks like and then I finally drove around and actually went to these areas because I had to fly at these areas so in my research I'm pretty confident that I found the most unequal areas in South Africa but I didn't want to just focus on wealthy versus poor I wanted to make the project broad enough to incorporate sort of my artistic vision to incorporate visual metaphors and other types of imagery that would inspire people to want to look above fences and to want to look at the other side what was going on in their neighbors yards what was going on over the fences that they couldn't see over so I incorporated it too to have images like this which is a informal settlement right next to a cemetery in Tim bisa which is also not too far from here and a lot of people asked me and I think probably some people still think well what's in it for me why does this matter to me I don't live in those places I don't really care about those things what's the big deal and my answer would just be you're wrong it does matter to you and you should care about it this little girl's name is Cephas Elia I met her about two months ago in a continuation of this project working with Thomson Reuters she lives in Mantua BC Park which is in Khayelitsha in Cape Town she's 12 years old she lives in a tin shack but she's your neighbor she goes to a South African public school she's gonna grow up and she's gonna have kids and she's gonna work and she's going to become your neighbor your coworker the compatriot that you live with in your city she's a South Africa and this is her neighborhood this is mano a BC Park just as an example of the power of shifting your perspective going from that view that we just saw the slide before to where she lives now and how effective it is at getting across certain points I want you guys to spend the next minute and try to find where the toilets are in this photo does anyone see the toilets there's not very many of them I can tell you that there's 25,000 people that live in mono lbc Park you can see right here along this road right in the middle of that road there's a small little block of ten toilets and the day that I was there eight of them were locked and two of them were broken those are the only toilets in this entire photograph everyone in this photograph has to use those ten toilets if they want to go to the bathroom if they don't want to use those toilets they have to use the bush and the bush is filled with dangers like sea Fasil a his friend who five years ago went to the bush to go to the bathroom and never came back these sorts of issues these sorts of problems that your neighbors are dealing with that's exactly why I wanted to start this project and that's what I'm hoping that I'm starting to get across when people want to use aerial imagery in their storytelling in their journalism in their policymaking people ask me what's my plan with the project and I really really hope that people are using my images and I know they are to plan conferences to communicate ideas to work on planning out how to better deliver services how to better construct houses how to make us all more equal but really deep down what I really want out of the project is to change people's mindsets is to get people to tap into that compassion that I know we all have that we feel for our neighbors that neighborly love that want to better our neighbors who live on the other side of the fences and to do that we need to understand what it is they're living in and what it is they're living like defining the problem is the first step towards solving it so as I finish up here I really invite all of you guys after you've listened to me when you go home tonight when you go to your big houses behind the fences imagine what it felt like to be on this mountain and to float away from yourself and look back in and try to do that in your own community try to float above your own house and try to see yourself as part of a holistic whole in your own City if you can visualize that then I think our neighbors are going to thank you very much and we're going to move very quickly towards solving these problems that affect our cities thanks very much [Applause] [Music] you [Music]