Bastiaan Woudt · 34 works
Champions is a photographic series by Bastiaan Woudt, created in Zambia in October 2023 in collaboration with Orange Babies. The project marks the organisation's 25th anniversary and centres on a group of young Zambians who work within their own communities to break the silence around HIV.
The images do not document crisis. They show agency. Through Woudt's monochrome lens, these young adults become what they are: advocates, educators, connectors. Orange Babies calls them Champions. Woudt photographs them as heroes, warriors, kings and queens.
The project grew out of a personal decision. Woudt had wanted to use his work for a charitable cause for some time. When he connected with Orange Babies, the Champions programme was presented to him, and it resonated immediately. Not because of the scale of the HIV crisis, but because of how Orange Babies chose to address it: from within. Through people, not systems.
Orange Babies began nearly 25 years ago at the peak of the HIV epidemic, focused on preventing mother-to-child transmission. Pregnant women received testing, medication, and support through birth and beyond. More than 500,000 children were born healthy through this programme. Many of the mothers, once ostracised by their families, grew into confident, independent women. They wanted to give back. They became Community Mothers, caring for vulnerable children in their neighbourhoods: cooking, helping with homework, ensuring HIV-positive children took their medication.
The assumption had been that knowledge about HIV would pass naturally from generation to generation. It did not. The taboo was too strong. Children who lost parents often never learned the cause. Infections, especially among young people, continued to rise. Orange Babies realised that the model of the Community Mothers, change driven from within by people with lived experience, needed to be replicated among the younger generation. That is how the Champions programme was born: 25 young, determined Zambians trained to enter schools, set up Youth Friendly Corners, and create safe spaces where peers could ask questions about HIV, medication, sexual education, teenage pregnancy, mental health, and domestic violence.
Woudt travelled to Zambia in October 2023 to photograph these Champions and the broader community they serve. The trip spanned roughly a week, moving through schools, compounds, and rural areas. He visited Pa Kachele school, where children aged six to sixteen played football in expansive gardens next to tall maize fields. He photographed at ROC's school in Lusuno, a rural settlement at the edge of a village with its own vast grounds and a Mother Shelter nearby, a place where women stay in the final days before giving birth in a basic local clinic, to avoid walking kilometres in labour. He spent time at the Heal Project, an orphanage where evenings turned into gatherings around campfires with music and dancing children. He accompanied home visits in the compounds, entered local markets, and drove to natural landscapes outside the towns.
The aim was never to photograph poverty or suffering. Woudt was looking for what he always looks for: form, dignity, presence. In his own words: "I chose to show these young adults as advocates, as incredible symbols of dignity and strength, flourishing against all odds. I aimed to transform them into heroes, warriors, kings and queens, a visual representation of their indispensable role in the fight against HIV and AIDS."
Champions operates on two levels. On the surface, it is a portrait series of young Zambians and the communities they inhabit. Beneath that, it is a study of agency, the idea that the people closest to a problem are best positioned to solve it.
Woudt's visual approach is consistent with his broader practice: monochrome, high contrast, minimal. The removal of colour strips the images of geography and specificity. What remains is form, texture, and the directness of the human gaze. The portraits carry a stillness that elevates the subjects beyond their circumstances. A young woman standing in front of a concrete wall is not a victim. She is composed, deliberate, present.
The series moves between portraits, landscapes, and community scenes. School children. Mothers. Market stalls. The vast, open terrain of rural Zambia. The interplay between figure and environment is central. Woudt photographs people within their surroundings, not extracted from them. The landscapes are not backdrop. They are context.
Unlike earlier projects such as Peak, where landscape dominated and human presence was encountered along the way, Champions reverses the hierarchy. The people are the subject. The landscape serves the story. Yet in both, Woudt's signature remains the same: an insistence on dignity, on seeing people as they wish to be seen.
The choice to work in black and white, as always, is not stylistic but intentional. It removes the exotic. Zambia in colour risks becoming a travel photograph. In monochrome, it becomes universal. The viewer is invited to look at the person, not the place.
The conditions in Zambia were different from Woudt's earlier projects. There were no multi-week treks or extreme altitudes. But the work required a different kind of endurance: navigating a new cultural context, working with communities where trust had to be earned, and photographing in environments that were unpredictable by nature. The number of women at the Mother Shelter could range from seven to zero. Children at the orphanage might be energetic or withdrawn. Champions in the field were often surrounded by the noise and movement of markets and school yards.
Woudt's method remained consistent. He worked with natural light, looked for strong compositional elements in the environment, walls, doorways, open space, and allowed subjects to settle into their own posture. The portraits are not posed in the traditional sense. They are observed, waited for, arrived at.
The week was structured but flexible: schools during the day, community visits in the afternoons, evenings at the orphanage or in reflection. Every location offered something different. The maize fields at Pa Kachele. The rural isolation of Lusuno. The dense energy of the market. The quiet of the Mother Shelter.