A photograph is a caricature of a situation. You try to capture a story with one picture.

People love to form tribes, groups where you belong to, that give you some level of security and comfort with established rules that differentiate you from other tribes. A gay club in Hong Kong, an art group in San Francisco, merry Bavarians in their traditional costumes or fierce head hunters in the Cordilleras, they all are tribes and subcultures.

I am no permanent part of any tribe. I never joined a fraternity, a sports club nor church. But I visit tribes and interact with them. Coming from the outside I become the participating observer and then document a tribe's curiosities. I stay as long until the curve of diminishing return reaches a level that tells me that it would be more fruitful to start all over again in a new tribe.

Many of the traits that allow people to bind into a tribe are not accessible for me and repetition, a common form of reaffirmation of belonging, is torture for me.

You need to have the distance of an outsider to be able to recognize the speciality of a tribe. But you also need to be close so you can get their trust and finally you need to retreat again to be able to mentally digest.

I study tribes. I am trying to find out what makes them do the things they do. Like a cartoonist I highlight what I discover. My photographs are in effect - cartoons.

Andy Maluche