When we hear the word portrait we think of a face, eyes and a smile.
However, to shake things up a bit, this month’s Storyteller Mission was
to capture a “faceless” portrait. In doing so, we found ourselves wanting
to see more — and to know more — about the faces we weren’t able to see.

Each month, the team at Lowepro challenge their Storytellers to a mission, assigning a word or phrase and asking that we show them our visual interpretations.  Because the Storytellers are spread all across the globe, each with their own unique personal style, it is always exciting to see how everyone translates this prompt into pictures.

When we hear the word portrait we think of a face, eyes and a smile.  However, to shake things up a bit, this month’s Storyteller Mission was to capture a “faceless” portrait.  Among the contributing Storytellers, many emotions were created with this challenge and we found ourselves wanting to see more — and to know more — about the faces we weren’t able to see.

My submission was an old “faceless” portrait I made in Dili, the capital city of Timor-Leste, almost eight years ago.  Timor-Leste has had a tumultuous past.  It was colonized by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, then invaded by the Indonesians in the 1970’s and finally, after centuries of foreign rule and following a United Nations-sponsored act of self-determination, gained its sovereignty in 1999.  Christened “Asia’s diamond in the rough”, the people of this scarred, fledgling nation continue to strive for recognition as they carve out a place in the world for themselves.  I visited Timor-Leste in 2009 and again in 2010 to document the philanthropic work of a Singapore-based NGO; it was during my second visit that I made this photograph in one of Dili’s markets.  For me, this image — with the sunlight dancing behind the silhouette of a faceless woman — reminds me of the beauty that endures beneath the scars in one of Asia’s poorest nations.

Click here to see all the Lowepro Storytellers’ “Faceless Portrait” submissions.

And click here to browse more of my Timor-Leste reportage.