"I grew up in Indonesia during its economic boom and left shortly before the fall of Suharto’s regime. I then moved to Scotland to study history in Glasgow. However, books could not compete with the immediacy I found in observing the process of Indonesia’s political and economic collapse of the late 1990s.
After university, I went to Timor-Leste, shortly after it had been destroyed by the Indonesian army in late 1999. There, I worked for an NGO that distributed humanitarian aid. This was mostly housing materials intended to enable some of the population to rebuild their burnt homes. I then spent a year travelling to some of Indonesia’s numerous conflict zones photographing refugees and internally displaced people.
My next guise was as a non-fiction editor in Australia. Here I learned about first world problems—the environment and its degradation, and the racism that enables Australia’s appalling refugee policies and continuing ignorance of the shame of Aboriginal Australia. I spent time photographing in public, on city streets. Informed by a tremendous body of historical and contemporary street photography, I learned ways to view strangers, a form of photography I love. However, like most photographs, these are stolen, and although they occasionally amuse or reveal a significance of some sort, they are at best superficial.
I returned to Indonesia in 2004 as an election monitor, and then went to Timor-Leste as a writer working on a history of the conflict with the Commission for Truth, Reception, and Reconciliation.
[In 2005] I chose to photograph asylum seekers in Glasgow in order to document the experience of asylum families in the UK. This brought me into an intimacy and proximity with my subject that was challenging, frustrating and time consuming. I learned the power of story telling through a series of images. Photographing strangers who became friends was very rewarding.
I have returned again [to Timor-Leste], and am beginning to photograph contemporary Timor and to explore some of its more pressing issues such as health, the environment, education and the local economy. Despite having spent ten years visiting this country, I remain very ignorant of it. Photography is a way for me to stoke my curiosity, and to learn."
- Robin Taudevin, April 2006
A sky-diver in his teens and early twenties, Robin had started free-diving in his late 20's, opening the door to underwater photography. In April 2006 the Timor-Leste military crisis spread violence throughout the country. Robin documented both sides of the conflict and the people displaced by it. On the 14th of May 2006, Robin drowned when free-diving alone off Cristo Rei beach in Timor Leste. He was 29.
