Nairobi, Kenya

NAIROBI, KENYA | "The City in the Sun"

Nairobi is the only city on earth with a national park on its boundary — a forty-five-square-mile wilderness of savanna, acacia forest, and black rhino territory that begins four kilometers from the central business district, where the giraffe silhouettes on the horizon are framed by the glass towers of a city of five million people. The city sits at 1,795 meters above sea level on the equatorial Highlands, giving it a climate of perpetual spring — warm days, cool nights, and a quality of light that photographs beautifully at every hour. Nairobi was founded in 1899 as a railway depot on the Uganda Railway and became the capital of British East Africa within a decade; it is now the financial, diplomatic, and technological hub of the entire East Africa region, home to the United Nations Environment Programme, the African Development Bank, and the highest concentration of international NGOs on the continent.

The colors are specific and extraordinary: the deep red-ochre of the Nairobi National Park's laterite soil, the jade green of the highland vegetation in the Karen and Langata suburbs, the warm amber of the acacia scrub at low sun, and the blue-white of the equatorial sky at 1,795 meters — a palette that exists nowhere else in Africa and that shifts entirely between the long rains of April and the crystalline dry season of July and August.