Kenya Film Photography | Kisii, Nairobi & Mombasa on 35mm | King Nemuel Visuals
Kenya.
grief, roots,
& the return
Kisii · Nairobi · Mombasa, 2023 & 2025
Two trips. Two different reasons to go home. The first in 2023 — to lay my dearest maternal grandmother to rest in Kisii, to be held by family in the middle of loss, and to plant flower seeds on her grave as a friend had asked me to. The second in 2025 — not to grieve, but to stay a while. Nairobi, Mombasa, cousins, coast. Both times shot on film, because some things deserve the weight of a slower frame.
My Dearest Grandmother's Farewell
We came to lay to rest the kindest woman I have ever known. My maternal grandmother — the warmth at the center of our family, the reason so many of us exist the way we do. Her home in Kisii received us all: cousins I hadn’t seen in years, aunts and uncles, the particular tenderness of a family that knows how to hold each other through the hardest things. Before I left Minneapolis, a friend handed me flower seeds. Plant them on her grave, she said. A signal that her life and impact are still ongoing. I did. I don’t know if they grew. I think about it often.
“Our names strive for a fleeting immortality, a delicate trace lingering after we’re gone. In ascending, we become only our fragile, weightless names, buried under the earth. Vibrant and warm in life, they fade into softness, easing the weight of loss.”
On what it means to bury someone you loveThe Road, Kisii to Nairobi
I had never taken the Narok route before. The drive back to Nairobi cuts through the Rift Valley, towns that exist between everywhere else, roadside vendors, schoolchildren in uniform, livestock crossing without ceremony. I shot through the window most of the time. A lot of the frames came out blurred, and I kept them. Motion blur felt right for that particular journey. You are moving because you have to. Life keeps its own pace regardless of what you just left behind.
“In every immigrant’s heart is a whisper: What if I could have stayed and still thrived? What if we never needed to leave? Perhaps in another universe, we stayed, and we grew up under the same stars that watched over our own childhoods.”
On roots, distance & the road betweenNairobi, the city & the family
The 2025 trip was planned with no agenda heavier than presence. Nairobi in the daylight, its energy, its pace, its people. Family I had not seen since 2023, now without the shadow of a funeral over the reunion. Portraits mostly. Faces I know. The city in between.
Mombasa, the coast
Mombasa was the exhale. After Nairobi’s density, the coast opened everything up, the light softer, the pace slower, the Indian Ocean doing what it always does. The same ocean that edges Tanzania. These places are closer than the borders suggest.
Two trips. A grandmother laid to rest in Kisii. The Rift Valley seen through a window at speed. Nairobi in the daylight, reunion without grief. Mombasa exhaling onto the coast. Kenya holds all of it at once.