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My mom told me that when a baby was born in my Yalalag community, our ancestors carefully covered their placenta and umbilical cord in a clean piece of cloth and buried them into their patio houses, covering them after with a palm hat. The ritual represents the roots of the newborn being planted, reinforcing their connections with the land and community. In an offering, we are part of the land, and the land is part of us. We become part of something bigger.
This series of images and manipulated photo objects are the start of a personal process of healing from the suffering of colonization, in which photography is a ritual to explore the role of women in my community, my relationship with my roots, territories, and migration movements. In this practice, I direct the feminine energy to heal these wounds, to revive in my tongue the language of my ancestors, to understand and keep the ancestral knowledge, to encourage my people to appreciate our heritage and feel proud of our origins. Each stitch, scratch, and brushstroke is an act of resistance, a reaffirmation of my existence, that sustains my connections to my family, community, and land. Creating this body of work is a curative ritual to explore the different elements that shaped my duxherha (the whole, body, spirit, and soul), to bury my fears, and sow strength for the ones coming. In each piece I insert elements of my culture and family history – a thread, a plant, a seed, a tree, charged with different meanings – to link the stories of my ancestors. In this way each object tells their story for those who look under the surface.
“I’m very grateful for this opportunity to reflect on my own practice, to question everything I have done and will do. Practicing photography will never be the same. I started thinking I would go out into the world, but instead, I turned into myself. I embraced my fears and vulnerability, and I had the chance for the first time to validate the active role that my fellows and I play in our communities with our work. I’m finishing the program with fresh eyes and inspired by the amazing creators that I’m proud to call family.”
This project is a chapter from a larger body of work called Ben’n Yalhahj (I’m from Yalalag). My main goal with this project is to make images of my people for my people, to reunite my extended family and create our family album. By sharing my work with my community Villa Hidalgo Yalalag in the Oaxaca's Northern Sierra, I hope to bring back to my motherland the love and collaboration I have received from my relatives in the different territories we inhabit, to maybe impacting their own perception, the relevance of value our practices, to keep practicing them, and spread our culture.
We are each other's bridges to the past
so you can be here again with us
I gaze at your empty bed
while the white orchid blooms outside
All my life, I saw my grandmother worshipping Mother Mary day and night. The day I found out that my grandmother's real name is not Elisabeth, but Souw Hong Nio, it was already too late to ask questions. For three decades after former Indonesian strongman Suharto’s coup, it was not a conversation that we had around the dining table. From 1965 to 1998, Indonesians with Chinese ancestry were banned from expressing their culture, tradition, and language in public. They were labeled stateless. I realized part of us died with my grandmother’s death, and I fear losing a sense of who we once were. I began this work to honor her while setting out to discover what it meant to be a Chinese-Indonesian in the present day.
The work is an attempt at recreating a collective memory by collaborating with family members and the Chinese-Indonesian community. It looks broadly at how personal keepsake and memory can transcend the structural and geopolitical tension that was caused during the revolution, and especially how religion was a tool to erase ethnic identity during the period of nation-building post-cold war in Southeast Asia — with consequences that last until the present day. Then, The Orchids Turned Grey attempts to navigate loss while collecting memories kept silent for generations.
“Social justice could also mean talking to your friend, cousin, aunt, uncle, and mother about the things that bother you. To ask difficult questions, to listen with intention, and to tell stories to connect the threads of what makes us human.”
This project explores how the loss of ancestral memory influences the loss of diversity of the seeds with which we feed ourselves.
Last year, while working with communities protecting agrobiodiversity in Ecuador, my father told me that my grandfather and great-grandmother were seed guardians and that my grandfather created two varieties of potatoes. I was immediately interested in learning about their history and wondered what memory I had forgotten about the land and the crops. So, I decided to travel to Colombia. Unfortunately, when I arrived, I realized that the idea of the village that my father kept in his memory no longer existed.
This work is a journey to my father's town searching for my ancestors and my family of farmers. It is a two-voice narrative formed between the memory of my father and my own current perception traversed by the changes that small farmers have undergone in three generations. With digital and film photography, videos, and my father’s drawings, this piece integrates the philosophical and mystical aspects of the loss of agrobiodiversity.
It is a story about the loss of memory and culture, but also about resistance to violence and the re-signification of knowledge.
In the past twenty years, we have lost 75% of seed varieties worldwide. This project points to a larger question: what is causing more and more seeds to disappear? I have learned that a loss of ancestral memory, due to migration, racism and colonization is at the heart of this issue. For me, reclaiming seed biodiversity is also a metaphor for restoring ancestral memory.
“Social justice for me means to inhabit the world from a place of respect and commitment to others, to oneself and to the planet. It means understanding the privileges that one has in order to use them for the good of the changes that one wants to see in the world. The difference that this course made in my perception is to really feel that these changes and this way of inhabiting the world start from the simplest conversations with your family, from the most basic actions of respect towards yourself, that social justice can only be built from many fronts together in community and that being consistent with what you do is fundamental.”
This piece will become part of a larger transmedia project, including documentary photography, archival materials, creative audio, and video art. These works will be organized into chapters, focusing on specific themes, and relating to work I did with biologists at a seed bank (DENAREF) in Ecuador and ancestral communities and farmers around Latin America. I hope that, as a multimedia art project, told from an intimate point of view, a wider audience may become aware of this urgent issue.
When I decided to become a photographer, I thought the only way to leave behind my caste identity was to go far away from my village. For the last 15 years, I have lived in different cities making a career in photography until the Covid-19 pandemic made me go home. With the lockdowns keeping me home for extended periods of time, I came to confront the reality that I was born into. Being in my village, I realized that social distancing isn’t new to us, we have lived our lives in isolation since birth.
However, staying very close with all my family members, I was able to see the beauty in the everyday life of my family and village. Turning the lens upon myself, I began documenting my family and my home that I have been ashamed of all these years. Photographing the everyday joys, struggles, agitations and discrimination of my family and making it a part of the visual consciousness of this country was my way of resisting the oppression that continues to haunt us till day. What began as an attempt to document the daily life of my family and my village with photographs, the work now extends itself to use staged photographs of my family, videos and a voiceover to become a documentation of four generations of my family.
Taking the form of a heartfelt letter to my four year old nephew Kirubakaran, I hope this work lends him a helping hand as he begins to confront the realities of being born in this country that divides people on the basis of caste. I hope for a world where Kirubakaran and all the others from his generation live a life without oppression.
“I feel I have found my own voice during this program. I found a sense of clarity about my photography, and I have started to accept myself, my culture, and where I come from.”
The above are excerpts from a larger multimedia project that includes, audio, video, and still images.
My name is Jean Bizimana, and I am a documentary photographer and humanitarian focused on social issues around Africa.
I’ve spent the last couple of years exploring motherhood. I’ve met with so many women to understand their motivations and experiences. One woman told me that “being a mother is love, mercy, happiness, and passion.” That really stuck with me because I have never felt this passion. I never knew the value of having parents because I grew up an orphan from the Rwandan genocide.
This made me deeply curious about the concept of motherhood. And after making work about other people’s stories, I am now turning to my own. I am starting this process by writing a letter to my parents. I am updating them for the last 27 years of my life. How I grew up and what I am doing today.
This letter is a place for me to put my burdens as an orphan. And while my parents aren’t able to actually read it, there are orphans around the world who can. I hope that by sharing my story and insecurities, I can offer them strength and courage.
“My project was initially about motherhood, but during the fellowship it changed and became a letter to my own parents. This helped me to express my life experience and the burdens I faced as an orphan. At the beginning, it was very difficult for me and I was very shy to tell the world my insecurities. But with the help of my mentor Newsha Tavakolian, I did it, and then I was free in my heart.”
Shifting is the story of Valentina, an 11 year old girl who dreams of becoming a photographer. She is waiting for her mom who is in jail for the third time because of marijuana dealing. For both the distance is not easy. How do you grow up with your mom in prison?
This project is a multimedia short film made in collaboration between the two of us. It includes images of her daily life, her mother's songs from prison, and an animated piece based on their last memory together. Together, we have been illustrating her inner world, a world of her own that doesn’t revolve around incarceration.
Governments across Latin America are incarcerating an alarming number of women for possessing or selling small amounts of drugs. In Ecuador, it is children who are most affected by extreme sentencing and drug policy. Of the women currently serving time in prison, 54% remain there for micro-trafficking and 90% of those women are mothers.
I met Valentina through my own experience as a sister of a prisoner. On February 19, 2016, my cousin, who is like my brother, was arrested for marijuana possession. Since that date, my family and I have been prisoners too. In that time, my aunt, mom, and I have had to take on the economic maintenance, legal process, prison visitation, and other situations where violence, fear, and police abuse marked our lives. Like us, so many other families had to spend their time and money just to survive jail.
I started working in prisons and rehabilitation centers with artistic and Hip Hop projects, and along with my family's experience, began to know prison life in a more intimate way. I felt the distance, injustice, corruption, uncertainty and precariousness that families and prisoners have to face. This generated a bond and friendship with several families, among them Iblunth and Valen, with whom I worked on this project.
Each day, the number of prisoners increases, but beyond the bars are families waiting to make their dreams come true: Freedom.
“For me, social justice is the honesty that connects humanity in a transformative way. During this fellowship I had the opportunity to understand social justice in my own making and in the way other visual creators have done it from their stories. Those experiences create a sense of how social justice feels, how it means a collective narrative that touches us all with empathy, love, and dignity.”
This project is part of a series of stories that will include in-depth research, a rap album, and personal diaries about the families of drug prisoners in Ecuador. These stories will serve as narrative instruments that create connections between incarcerated women and their families, and show audiences the dreams, fears, and lives of a new generation facing the incarceration system in Latin America.
In a fishing village a woman sits under the tree she planted in front of her house, reading the Quran as the birds gather around her, remembering the house she built with her husband for just 25 EGP. She remembers that he was so kind, filling the holes with papers so the cold wind couldn’t enter, covering her with plastic bags to warm her every morning.
It was heaven there, but this house no longer exists now. It's just a memory.
This village is a community of fishers around the Mahmoodiyah canal in the Al max neighborhoods in Alexandria, Egypt, near my home. Once called the Middle East’s Venice, I passed by it every day on my way home when I first started photography. It was one of the most attractive locations for amateur photographers to practice because of the beautiful landscape, ancient culture, and friendly people.
One day residents woke up to the news that they had to leave their houses, their history, and possibly their lives as fishers. It led me to wonder: What does a home mean? What does displacement mean? And how does it feel just waiting for something to come and change your life forever?
Here, The Doors Don’t Know Me is a long-term project that aims to amplify the voice of this community, half of whom have been displaced so far, and will soon be published as a website resource. From 2016 to 2021, I collaborated with the residents to document their lives in photographs, as they wrote “last letters” about the homes they were losing. In writing their letters and sharing their memories, struggles, and dreams, we dedicate this project to building awareness and community about what is happening.
“My work started to change along with my thinking during this fellowship…I learned how to better respect and protect the people I photograph. It’s a big responsibility that we should always have in mind. ”
This work was made possible thanks to the protagonists, as they are the main storyteller in every story, and by the work of fixer and researcher Hemida Said. Many thanks to everyone involved in the making of this project.
Every day after waking up in the morning, I go to my father's room full of hope to see him standing in front of me, like he did in the past. But still he is paralyzed.
While unemployment is a heavily reported topic, the stories often fail to go beyond statistics. Joblessness and economic decline have consequences for both the individual and the family unit. Since 2019 I have witnessed the untold and the unseen side of the story, experiencing the helpless situation of my father and how his voice is getting suppressed to an extreme.
At the age of 57, my father, Ganesh Chandra Roy, lost the job that had sustained him for 12 years. This provoked him with massive anxiety and depression until he became a complete blank. Already a challenging situation, that same year he suffered two back to back strokes that left the left side of his body paralyzed.
My father’s experience and my family’s struggle is the story of many families facing economic decline and unemployment world-wide. Through this story, I want to shed light on the untold effects of the relationship between poverty and health.
“When I shared this project, many people could relate with their own life events, and shared their own stories with me. It’s important to start a conversation. I try to tell large stories in a subtle way where we can touch someone’s heart and heal together. Not all the time we can change problems on a larger scale, but we can create a small impact in humans’ hearts which leads to changing someone else’s thinking process.”
These still images are part of a short film that will premier within the coming year.
I grew up along the Bronx River, skipping school to hide away there or skate with my little brothers. During the pandemic, walks along the river were my escape. As I reflected about how the river has provided me shelter, I felt aligned with the people before me who have also sought out shelter, who have worked and lived alongside the river. I became fixated on the history of development, colonization, and industrialization, and began to see a pattern. I started to see a wave of new construction.
For over 400 years the Bronx River has experienced many changes. Once called the “Aquehung River,” it served the Lenape as a means of shelter, food, and spirituality. European colonization in the 1600’s set in motion the river’s transformation into an eventual dumping ground, as companies spewed their toxic sewage throughout the industrialization and urbanization that followed. In the 1970’s a new movement for environmental preservation began an urgency to preserve this 23 mile fresh water river and the access to it.
In this project, I photograph the changes and developments along the river, and the work of local community members and nonprofits to restore it. Using the New York Public Library digital archives, old newspapers, and books, I map the developments along the waterway. As I continue to document the journey of organizations like the Bronx River Alliance and others in creating solutions to reverse structural and systematic violence, I will also speak to other local organizers and community members that use the park about their initiatives and the kind of future they imagine for the river. I envision the final form of this project as a set of banners installed along the river where I will also conduct photo-based workshops that merge photography and foraging in the park's foodway. The aim of this series of workshops is to further community engagement by highlighting efforts to revitalize our green spaces and the importance of protecting them.
“Social justice is to create solutions that best serve the community. To deconstruct the oppressive systems that affect our communities. I think my understanding of social justice has expanded and photography became even a bigger part of it. The process of making images could be used to build community, to hold systems accountable, and much more.”
Quechua is the most widely spoken ancestral language in Peru. Discrimination against ancient cultures has been one of the factors that makes it difficult for younger generations to learn this language of their ancestors. I consider myself part of the generation who didn't learn the language from their parents.
In hip-hop culture, the ancient language finds a means of free expression. Young rappers emerge with the intention of reevaluating and asserting their identity and ancestral customs through the Quechua language, creating a message of protest and resistance.
A Quechua phrase that translates to “healer, speak,” “speaking heals,” and “speech that heals,” Hanpiq Rimay represents a collaborative process of using hip-hop and audio-visual tools to express ourselves via the Quechua language and culture. A sum of individual and collective experiences of mutual learning in both urban and rural contexts, this project allows us to connect with our ancestors, our family and embrace our Andean identity. It allows us to freely express our doubts, fears, personal and community goals. It is a project based on reconciliation with our roots that have been highly discriminated against for so long until today.
“Changing the world is done in small gestures, small steps. This process helped me change my world first, my way of thinking. Then in the collective. We have the opportunity to create a space where the Quechua language is free to express itself and seeks new ways of communicating, in this case hip-hop. Little by little, with respect and honesty, we will take bigger steps. And if it is not with Hanpiq Rimay, there will be other processes generated by each individual. We are like seeds that seek to flourish.”
Through a collaborative process with a collective of artists, we are working towards the development of our first EP album and accompanying multimedia video art piece in both Quechua and Spanish.
