Bio:
Cyndy B Waters:
Born in Sevierville, Tennessee in 1957
1976 Graduate-Art Institute of Atlanta.
Cyndy worked throughout the United States after graduation with jobs such as, Photographer for the State of Tennessee and Official Photographer for the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville TN. With a great list of references from the Fair in 1983, Cyndy moved to Washington DC and operated Paine & Waters Photography specializing in political PR on Capital Hill and documentary photograph. She has photographed 5 U.S. Presidents. While photographing the opening of Dollywood in 1986, Cyndy met a Los Angeles film crew, Johnson/Klein Productions. They invited her to join their production company. She made the move and enjoyed 6 years of working in LA photographing many of the people from the “Woodstock Generation” such Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Woopie Goldberg and many other celebs.
She often photographed children in challenging situations, using her images to expose their needs. Cyndy traveled to Kenya on a spiritual journey in 1995. She was overwhelmed by the lack of education, food, and physical care many women and children faced causing her to step out from behind her camera and develop The Orbit Village Project, Inc. In July 2025 the project celebrated it 30th birthday with many guest from Tennessee and the USA traveling there for the celebration. Today, the project is quite large and feeds, cares for, and educates approximately five hundred children and youth, and focuses on helping hundreds of families survive and rebuild from a broken generation. She works between Sevierville and Nairobi, Kenya for most of the year and takes a few photographic trips annually.
In recent years Cyndy has returned to her original love of photographing people as she finds them in their daily lives. She first traveled to Ethiopia in 2023 and was amazed with all the different people groups there and their willingness to be photographed.She returned in July to continue working on a show called “The Ethiopian”. This will be anongoing focus and collection that will grow over the next few years. The first showing of The Ethiopian, curated by Elizabeth Aveadon opens September 5th, 2023 the The Emporium in Knoxville TN. Cyndy also loves adventure and travels to many exciting places to photograph. “I love the way the industry of photo workshops has developed over the years making great trips available to small groups of photographer to travel to places they might not want to travel along to experience the world and high adventure. I’m traveling to Antarctica at the end of this year for an adventure with a few friends filled with penguins and icebergs. What photography adds to my life just keeps getting better. “
Cyndy’s work from Africa was published in FAWCO’s Inspiring Women Online Magazine fall of 2020. She was featured as one of 16 American women photographers working around the world. Along with regularly having images hung on the walls of SxSE Gallery, in Molena, GA, SxSE published Cyndy’s work in an Article The Land Of The Maasai, in the Dec-Jan 2022 Issue of SxSE Photomagazine. Her work is regally selected as part of gallery shows and several of her images have won awards. She was featured in Volumes 1, 2 & 4 of the book series How I Created This, A Celebration of Images From The Road in 2021.
She has adopted 3 Kenyan children, all now adults, and has her first grandchild still making her home both Sevierville and Nairobi, Kenya.
Email: cyndybwaters@mac.com
Webpage: cyndybwaters.smugmug.com & OrbitVillage.org
Facebook: Cyndy B Waters & The Orbit Village Project
Instagram: CyndyBWatersPhotographer & AretEnkeraSafaris
Resume/CV (if applicable): Cyndys-ResumeCV.pages
Statement
The image, Smoking the Cows, Is one of my favorite from my recent work in Ethiopia. We arrive at this new beautiful village just after sunrise and the morning light was swirling thru the smoke around a group of cows and in the midst of the smoke was this young Arbore girl. I only had a few minutes to capture the shot before the sun would be to high.
I have been taking a deep look into the country where the oldest known people in the world lived. It is also the second most populated African country. While I did not find it to be crowded, I did find the most wonderful variety of people and traditions there. As a photographer, more so, a people photographer who likes to photograph people immersed in their real lives, I was drawn in to the uniqueness and beauty of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian.
A large part of my show will focus on the people in Southern Ethiopia that are part of Omo River Valley tribes. Each tribe is quiet different from the others and photographing these people was a step back in time and a long look into windows of their culture and traditions that are still very much alive today. From the huts they live in, to the beads that adorn their bodies, and heavy necklaces the Hamer women wear from marriage till after death that announce which wife they are, to the scaring and cuttings that prove their strength and artistic individuality, they are all interestingly beautiful and fiercely unique.
The Kara tribe among others, still paint their faces and bodies for decoration, identification and protection. We camped on their land and existed together for days in a beautiful forrest where massive trees glowed golden at sunset on the banks of the Omo River.
The tribes are fighting to stay strong and continue to keep their culture and what outsiders may see as a very difficult and out of date lifestyle. But they will fight to keep their rights to live tribally and peacefully as Ethiopians. I was privileged to walk in their midst and be allowed to take photographs. We shared no common language aside for the nodding of heads, motions and facial expressions and the magical sharing of eyes seeing and meeting thru the lens of my cameras.
I carried only my Nikon Z9 & Z8, a few lenses, a reflector and diffuser and asmall light cube along a black piece of cloth. Mostly I shaded them from harsh sunlight or bounced the morning light back towards them to fill in shadows. I often shot at a very high ISO with long exposures ,praying for stillness as we stared at each other in the near darkness of huts and churches. Often, I felt oddly invisible. Recently on a return visit to capture more the many people groups in Ethiopia, I traveled thru the lake regions in the Rift Valley up to the mountains of Lalibela where in the 11th century King Lalibela and his men carved 14 churches out of the mountains and they are still in use today by the Orthodox Christians. Lalibela is drenched in the history of the struggles of Christianity across the ages. The route to Jerusalem had been cut off to the Christians, and the king was determined to build a Jerusalem of their own, where they would always be allowed to freely worship. It was like the Old Testament coming to life. The churches are connect by tunnels, arches and small walkways that lead you deep into crowds of people worshiping throughout the night and in the hours before daylight. Long twisted candles light up chiseled faces of priest, monks and white robbed women with small prayer books held close to their faces. Music vibrates thru the rock hewn walls, woven with chants and prayers that flood the night air. Images and sounds still linger inside of me, calling me to go back again.
I am mesmerized by the beauty of this part of the world and the beautiful people who dwell there.
