When Brooklyn-based photographer Tahir Carl Karmali was a little boy in Nairobi, Kenya, he hand-built a television antenna using headphones and a metal hanger so that he could watch cartoons after school. He had mastered the trick simply by watching people in the workshops lining the streets of the city, where broken appliances could be torn apart, reassembled and revamped to create something useful. The people who turn seemingly unworkable objects into ingenious contraptions make up what’s known as Jua Kali, an informal economic sector that became the inspiration behind Karmali’s multimedia series by the same name.