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with Roxanne Engstrom. |
photographer. explorer. storyteller. |
Hi! I'm Roxanne and I love God, my family, chaos, culture, coconut milk lattes, and sharing stories. I am rarely seen without a camera or a latte in hand and I love to (over)share about life and tell stories. Stories draw me in, they inspire me, and they change me. I consider it a blessing and honor when people invite me in to tell part of their story. I am a mama of 4 crazy wonderful (also very loud) kids & I love when my clients tell me they LOVE their images because they see themselves as the strong, resilient, & amazing creation they are! My family is anything but perfect but I have learned to love the beautiful mess and capturing moments moves me and teaches me about this beautiful, broken world. I work with my clients to create images that tell stories; stories full of raw emotion, abundant in authenticity, & that move us in compassion for one another.
Why Hawa Images? Hawa is a name conveying many interwoven meanings. In Swahili, it means “these” as opposed to “those” and Hawa Images is about sharing the stories of these people; near or far, foreign or familiar, similar or seemingly different.
Hawa is also the Arabic name for Eve; the first woman to bear another; a giver of life. Hawa Images desires to partner with people to share their stories as created ones, valued, loved, dignified, and with purpose. Stories of family, love, work, culture, time, space, and life lived. Just as Scripture speaks of wind that blows wherever it pleases and the unexplainable nature of God’s Spirit, Hawa conveys the mystery of how He is at work among all people. Hawa Images believes in the power of stories to move people to empathy and then to action.
I adore humanitarian photography and I love to travel and roam around exploring, meeting people from around the world, and eating ALL the food. This desire to tell stories was birthed when I lived in East Africa; a place that has burrowed deep into my heart and provided many opportunities to express the beautiful diversity of God's creation through photography. My desire is to capture the humanity in each of us – people of every ethne and culture - through images & storytelling. I desire to capture images that compel us and change us.
Hawa Images believes that the communities that invite us into their stories should benefit from the images that we are privileged to capture. Some of the proceeds from every Hawa Images session goes to partnering with organizations doing hard and good work like World Relief & The Witness Foundation.
Roxanne is a member of the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.