women in a wartime

The project involves the creation of reportage stories from a number of different countries, showing women who have lived through war. The idea is to choose those women who have played a significant role in each country and to gather together their unmediated personal testimonies.

The black and white portraits show the women in their homes or in circumstances that illustrate the lives they now lead.

Particular attention has been given to those women who have undergone violence or imprisonment, or who are actively engaged in the defense of civil liberties.

The countries have symbolic value; they have been carefully chosen to represent all the women in the world who, in their different cultural and religious contexts, live and work for peace, justice and cooperation.

The countries are: Argentina, Guatemala, Bosnia, Palestine, Rwanda.

The focus of my work is women and the lives they lead. The only way to fully understand their energy and their strength is to actually experience the context in which they live.

I’m interested in bringing to the light the value of solidarity among spontaneous groups, the relationships between individual women who work daily to organize assistance, support and the resumption of lives that must continue. I’m not interested in analyzing the multinational organizations that benefit from quantifiable resources and backing.

Photographing these women today is one way of reclaiming lost gazes, echoes of ancient civilizations and a past that may be suppressed, complex reflections on the value of existence, exemplary stories of the struggle for survival, justice, truth and peace.

>>> photographers:network selection 2007
 
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