KLM AND PHOTOVOGUE INTRODUCE
Through a Local’s Eyes: Nick van Tiem’s Garden of Stones
The photographer embedded with Nairobi’s creative underground, emerging with an analog portrait series shaped by local talent and long-game trust.
Nick van Tiem was hard to miss on the streets of Nairobi: tall and unmistakably Northern European with a camera the size of a car battery. For over a decade, the Dutch photographer had pursued precision for the world’s most revered fashion houses, but on this trip, he was after something different: the unscripted moments that surface when control gives way to curiosity. “You can’t base your opinion of the world on what you see online or in the news,” he says. A pause. “I found something else here entirely.”
When KLM Royal Dutch Airlines invited him to capture a global city through local eyes, reflecting the airline's belief that travel opens doors to meaningful connections beyond the obvious, Nairobi rose immediately to mind. It’s a destination KLM has connected to Amsterdam for many years, yet one that rarely reveals itself beyond safari brochures. For van Tiem, the city represented both creative voltage and the kind of challenge that pushes past the predictable. He just needed someone who could move fluidly between its many layers. Fortunately, he knew exactly the right person.
Kennedy Mirema had been in van Tiem's orbit for over a year. A Nairobi-based creative director and co-founder of 199x Org, a collective bridging street culture and fashion, Mirema was more than connected; he was embedded. Social media follows led to messages between the two creatives, and maybe-someday proposals drifting between time zones. When van Tiem pitched Nairobi for this particular project, he waited with the patience of someone who knows that certain collaborations can't be rushed. The response landed like a bolt of lightning: “Mate, yes! Let's do this.”
What unfolded over six days barely resembled a traditional photographic project. While hotel guests filed into safari vans at dawn, van Tiem waited for Mirema—sometimes arriving by taxi, navigating morning gridlock, other times gripping the back of a boda boda, Nairobi’s ubiquitous motorcycle taxi. The contrast wasn't lost on van Tiem: tourists consuming packaged wilderness while he dove into the urban unknown. It's the kind of deliberate choice KLM enables by servicing more than 160 destinations, letting travelers skip the obvious and find the essential. Mirema acted as cultural interlocutor, navigating social nuance with intuitive ease. Van Tiem's analog process—one frame at a time, each exposure counted—enforced a different tempo. "It allows a certain calm," he says, "especially in places that feel busy."
Buruburu revealed that paradox in sharp relief. The eastern suburb, built in the 1970s as middle-class housing, offered complexity: a neighborhood where aspiration meets reality, where young creatives carve space from concrete. Here, the 12 O'Clock Boyz garage sits off the main drag, tucked between residential blocks where a loose confederation of riders transform back roads into a raceway every Sunday. Their name nods to Baltimore's dirt bike culture, but their version is distinctly Nairobian—less about rebellion, more about kinship. When van Tiem arrived, most of the crew had gone, their bike engines echoing through the neighborhood. Three remained: Phil, Dennis, and John—the only names they offered. Another photographer might have pivoted. Van Tiem settled in.
Photos retouched by Michael Frahm
For ninety minutes, the camera stayed zipped. Stories emerged about the garage owner who gives them space and how the crew is a chosen family. Trust accumulated like sediment as Mirema moved between languages, making space for van Tiem's presence to normalize. Only then did Phil extend his hand and say, 'We feel really blessed that we're going to be photographed by you.' The portraits that followed captured bold intimacy: Dennis draped across his bike, gaze level and unguarded; John suspended mid-wheelie above cracked asphalt, frozen between ascent and return.
Different energies defined GirlSkate Nairobi, though the underlying dynamic—claiming space where none is offered—remained constant. Founded by Jelimo Cheboi and Antoinette Apondi, the collective emerged from seeing the opportunity in the absence. In a city where skateboarding has traditionally been male territory, these women created their own circuit: Friday evenings on a rooftop overlooking Westlands' glass towers, Sundays wherever security guards won't chase them off. Van Tiem caught them in motion, boards fused to feet, the city stretched beneath them. In a place where women's freedom of movement is often contested, skateboarding becomes more than a sport–it becomes a declaration of autonomy.
“I try to show people the way they see themselves,” van Tiem explains. The connective threads through each portrait, each made possible by Mirema's network: Ruby Rasugu outside her chip shop, the teacher-turned-painter wearing a locally designed outfit that transforms mundane into something colorful. Joseph Yuruu with his horse, Ottiii, in Karen — a suburb of Nairobi — bringing African cowboy mythology to fashion in his mother's clothes. But the project's deeper meaning materialized, improbably, in gridlock. Stuck in Nairobi's notorious traffic—the kind that turns five-mile commutes into two-hour treks—van Tiem asked 199x Org co-founder Dalton Odiyo what it was like to navigate the city daily. 'Shamba la Mawe,' Odiyo answered. Garden of Stones. “It's an urban jungle. You grind hard to survive.” A pause. “But dig deep enough, you might strike gold.”
"I like to see the world through rose-colored glasses," van Tiem admits. Not as escape but through discipline that values patience and believes complexity always outlasts cliché. It's a sensibility aligned with what KLM Royal Dutch Airlines understands about meaningful travel: that arriving somewhere isn't the same as understanding it, that real connection begins with curiosity and deepens through time. Van Tiem didn't leave Nairobi with tidy takeaways. He left with something harder to define and more worthwhile, a portrait built through partnership rather than parachute journalism. The Garden of Stones delivered on Odiyo's heavy promise: gold for those willing to dig properly. His immediate plans to return, already plotting next projects with Mirema, speak to connections that transcend any single assignment.
Whether your next journey leads to Nairobi's creative underground, Amsterdam's fashion scene, or somewhere entirely unexpected, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines creates the routes that let curiosity lead the way—because the most memorable travels begin when you look beyond the obvious.
