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In Brazil, a man holds a naked baby on his shoulders
as father and child look out onto the slum where they live.
In West Africa, a team of amputees plays soccer on a dusty field.
From Argentina, a portrait of a mother and her disappeared child.
From many parts of the world, we see photos of child laborers working
because they have no choice.
In New York, we see a small creek that will probably remain forever
polluted.
These photographs are part of a new exhibition called “Five Lenses…
Forgotten Shades of Grey” at the Henry Gregg Gallery in Dumbo,
Brooklyn, New York. After the exhibit ends October 28 the photos are
available at its Web site,
henrygregggallery.com. Joshua Wolfe and Andre Martinez are the
curators for this moving exhibition that I prefer calling “memorable
shades of black and white.”
The stark photographs by Brazilian photographer Andre Cypriano are
from Rochina, the largest favela or slum, in Brazil. They are at times
breathtaking. Look at that man with the baby. Their backs are to us.
What would we see if we saw their faces? Look at the young boy sitting
on an empty staircase holding a gun. Is the gun loaded? Where did he
get it? Will he use it? Look at the remarkable photo of the beautiful
girl dead center in the shot. Does she have any future? Despite her
open expression, she appears trapped in that photo, squeezed by forces
she cannot control.
From Argentina, photojournalist Marcos Adandia tries to come to grips
with the phenomenon of the “disappeared,” one of the blots upon the
recent history of his country. He does this with deep, moving
portraits of mothers paired with separate portraits of children, the
children’s faces faded, and blurry, truly gone from life. Adandia says
he sees “Photographs as bridges in our memories. I intend to speak of
the disappeared through their mothers, and of the mothers through
their children.” And he does that through the juxtaposition of
deep-focused, hard-edged portraits of grieving mothers with the nearly
faded pictures of sons and daughters, probably not their own children,
yet still alive in their memory.
Pep Bonet, a photojournalist from Spain, became enamored with one of
the many terrible results of the tragic, mind-numbing civil war in
Sierra Leone, fought between 1991 and 2001. He calls his series “Faith
in Chaos.” Bonet returned three times for many weeks to document a
group of amputees, all victims of the war, who formed their own soccer
team despite their horrible disabilities. Setting aside the awfulness
of their mutilated bodies, the men got together and trained to play a
game that depends completely on one’s legs and the ability to run, to
cut, to be, in a word, athletic. Instead of seeing men on two legs, we
see men on one leg with a crutch, or sometimes on two crutches,
training and playing the game known the world over as football. Here,
clearly indomitable spirit is the winner over physical ability.
Doctor David Parker is a practicing physician at the University of
Minnesota School of Public Health. He specializes in occupational
medicine. In 1992, he decided that through photographs he would
document child labor around the world to show this abusive practice in
all its sadness. The children in his harsh black and white photos do
not look like children. Instead, they look like small adults doing
adult work, much of it hard labor, in order to survive in the hard
world in which they live. His photos should remind us that around the
world the use of children as laborers is still thriving.
Joshua Wolfe, a photographer from Brooklyn, does not turn his lens on
people the way the other documentary photographers in the exhibition
do. Instead, he looks at the environment and the effect pollution has
on our lives, often without us knowing it. In his series of photos, he
concentrates on Newton Creek, an ignored small body of water that
separates Brooklyn and Queens. Dating back more than fifty years, oil
companies have allowed more than 17 million gallons of oil into the
creek – never cleaning it -- making it one of the most polluted bodies
of water in the world. Looking at his photos, you can almost smell and
feel the effects of the polluted waterway on how we live.
Documentary still photography requires time, patience, a sharp eye,
and a willingness to return to a scene or location for as long as it
takes to get the pictures needed for a sequence or suite that tells
the story. The five photographers in this exhibition more than fill
those conditions.
View photographs from the exhibition.
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At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002.
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