Alltec Corporation - Giving Back

Alltec Corporation would like to recognize the work done by Jessica Hilltout, documenting, through her amazing photography, the joy, hardship and tremendous spirit of African youth through an absolute passion for football.

"I have always been interested in the poetic character of the small, seemingly unimportant things. To me, there is hidden beauty in the ordinary and great beauty in the overlooked." — Jessica Hilltout, Photographer

From the New York Times:

The most oddly soulful of Ms. Hilltout’s images are of objects: the homemade balls fashioned by children from plastic bags, old socks and rags, tied up with string or strips of tree bark. Some children inflated condoms — commonplace and free on a continent beset by AIDS — wrapped them in cloth to make them heavy, then in plastic bags to seal them and finally bound them in twine. These ingenious, improvised balls bounce like real ones for a few days before the air escapes.

Ms. Hilltout, 33, accepted these balls, each like a small, hand-wrapped gift, from the children who made them when she gave them the factory-made kind they longed for. She photographed their balls resting on cracked earth or cupped in hands with nail-bitten fingers. The people she met in some 30 villages stretched across west and southern Africa had no organized support: no free uniforms, no corporate sponsors, no subsidies of any kind. The walls of the gallery exhibit their feet, often bare or in flip flops or mismatched slippers with a toe peeking through a hole.

“So many people have so much and do so little with it,” she said. “The people I met had so little yet managed to do so much with it.”

You can purchase Ms. Hilltout's book and learn more about her experiences by visiting her website:
http://www.jessicahilltout.com