FILIP AGOO

A mask maker
I fell into photography just as the digital camera and Photoshop arrived. I worked in advertising and lifestyle magazines, retouching faces until they matched an ideal no one could live up to. Looking back, I see myself as a mask maker. I helped build the polished faces that mainstream culture holds up as the measure of a good life.

The moment at that magazine stand never left me. I stood there and thought about the unattainable ideals I was feeding into our culture, and about the children growing up with them. And I asked myself: if this is the best I can do?

The other direction
People told me I should go to LA. Instead, I travelled in the opposite direction.

I spent more than ten years on the road, in orphanages, metropolitan cities, townships, spiritual communities, rainforests and indigenous communities. At the same time, I turned inward. I dove into personal development and began questioning values I had been living by without ever choosing them. I learned that I could choose. As my values changed, my creative expression changed with them. I changed my mental diet, and my work followed. 

Portrait photographer
Today I see myself as a portrait photographer. Whatever I point my camera at becomes a portrait: a person, a lion, a forest, or hundreds of children in one frame. Over the years, the way I see stayed the same. What changed was what I chose to see.​​

What people taught me
Out of curiosity, I explored many traditions, including Daoism, Christianity, Sufism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Vedanta, Yoga, Animism, Shamanism and other ancient wisdom traditions. I learned from books, but above all from meeting people.

The differences were far greater in the scriptures than in the people. Wherever I went, I was met with curiosity, invited to dinner and welcomed into conversation. People were grateful that I showed up and kind to me, and together we created beautiful moments. The gods, deities and stories differed. But the same red thread ran through all of them: gratitude, kindness and forgiveness.​

On my journey  following my camera, I’ve been moving between huts and mansions, and I learned that a child’s laughter sounds the same in both.

On New Britain in Papua New Guinea, I met people who fish for about four hours each morning and spend the rest of the day with their families. When I called it paradise, they said I was the first visitor to say so. Everyone else had called them underprivileged.​

In Tanzania, a Maasai chief told me his people were content until mobile phones arrived. Once they could compare themselves to the rest of the world, they learned they were “poor,” and they lost the ability to enjoy what they had. He asked me to tell my people that what they have is worth something.​

I grew up on a farm, where my father read the signs in nature to know when to sow and when to harvest. Today, many of us, me included, know more brands than birds. People who still live connected to nature have so much to teach us, if we stop and listen. Through them, I came to see our planet not as a resource, but as Mother Earth. 

Remarkable times
We are living in remarkable times. Alongside everything that is breaking, something is waking up. More and more people long to live and create with meaning. We can all feel the tension of a great transformation. It is a time to unite around the values that bring us closer to each other.

The future is shaped by the stories we consume, and by the stories we choose to reflect back into the world through our art, thoughts, words and actions.​

Why I create
The question from that magazine stand kept growing: why do I create, and where do my values come from? Could I make an advertising campaign that benefited children instead of shareholders? That became the Human Alphabet, co-created with thousands of children around the world. From it grew Kinditude.

Kinditude invites children to explore the science of happiness through art and connection to nature. Gratitude grows, kindness ripples, happiness flows within.​

Coming from advertising, I know how powerful the tools of persuasion are. For decades they have been aimed at children. With Kinditude, children turn those same tools around and point them at us grown-ups, reminding us how amazing life already is. They become active creators instead of passive consumers. And they invite us to ask a different question, so we can tell a different story: What am I grateful for? How can I choose to be kind, to myself, to Earth and to others?

​Redefining success
Today, I see Earth as my client and the children as my shareholders. I feel incredibly successful. Not because it makes me financially rich, but because it gives me purpose. I find my joy in being alive and every breath I take rather than in the objects I've accumulated. 

I believe it’s time to redefine success. To move away from ideals that mainly feed overconsumption, toward a success where my happiness contributes not only to me, but to the well-being of Earth and others. Where no one and nothing has to suffer for the sake of my happiness.​

My journey has reshaped not only what I create, but why I create.​

I’m grateful to every person who has shared a meal, a story or a laugh with me along the way. This work is my way of passing it on.​

With gratitude,
Filip