Photography and Human Rights some examples

To follow up the previous posting about photography and human rights, here are some examples on how to connect the two. In the first link (Aperture), it features three photographers using photographs to highlight provocative social situations. I am particularly moved by Jonathan Torgovnik’s “Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape” where one of the photographs shows a mother and child standing side by side. With minimal words, the author is able to convey an enormous sense of courage and the power of resilience of the human spirit. In the second link, a group of people, not all of them professional photographers, organize themselves to do human rights photography. They define the what, how and why of their passion for this work.

One of the characteristics of this trade is that the focus is not on the artistic beauty of photographs but to be able to tell stories with certain political convictions via images. The goal of the photographer is not to make perfect images but to let images speak faithfully and powerfully to the situations/persons being documented. Much like writing academic papers, authors need to research the topic, inform themselves about the issue and decide how to get the images they need. It resembles ethnographical works in some sense where field researchers immerse herself/himself in a “location” and get the “data” in order to tell stories, yet the difference with photography is that the final product in this case is a series of photographs with some words. Making images speak is both political and an art.

http://www.aperture.org/humanrights/
http://socialdocumentary.net/about.php?id=2&sID=lfdlftyq