Articles
Excerpted from an article, "Photography and Forgiveness" (Queen's Quarterly, Canada, 2006)
Jill Scott, Associate Professor, German Department, Queen's University
[to be published in A Poetics of Forgiveness: Creative Responses to Conflict. New York: Palgrave, forthcoming.]
"The Photography Project at the Gisimba Memorial Centre Orphanage
It has been almost sixty years since [Robert] Fleming etched his first photographic peace project, but across the globe old and new conflicts rage, and rifts are deepened. Pictures, mostly now digital and moving, still tell us the story of these divides. And Fleming’s is but one example of photography’s power to transform ruin into reconciliation. The Photography Project at the Gisimba Memorial Centre Orphanage in Kigali does more than document the lives of the children housed there. It offers them a chance to take charge of their own depiction. By teaching them to use cameras and allowing them to photograph each other, the program enables these children to creatively express what cannot be spoken. In the summer of 2005, American photographer and peace journalist Kresta King Cutcher visited the centre each Saturday to give photography lessons. Each of the twenty-odd children in the class was given a Kodak disposable camera. With the aid of 17-year-old Denise Kiyetesi, who translated from English into Kinyarwanda, they were invited into the magic chemistry of photographic images. Then, left to their own devices, the children quickly found willing subjects; their friends, their only family, eagerly posed.
If [Robert] Fleming’s picture exposed the ambiguity of a few eager children in postwar Germany –a world away in time, space, and culture –these African youngsters seize the moment in its vexing complexity and beauty all on their own. The older children lost their parents to the Rwandan genocide, and the younger ones have been orphaned by HIV, but they do not wait for a foreign aid worker to “shoot” their world and deliver it to them. They are not objects for a lens, but take control of both instrument and medium and become looking, living subjects all in one.
IT TAKES courage, optimism, and even a little bit of madness to think that photography can heal the yawning wounds of genocide, but if one does not dare to dream, the dream won’t dare to happen. And, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu has so famously said: 'There is no future without forgiveness.'"
Kresta King Cutcher recalls, “One Saturday, I ran out of cameras, but it didn’t matter to this young boy.”
Jill Scott, Associate Professor, German Department, Queen's University
[to be published in A Poetics of Forgiveness: Creative Responses to Conflict. New York: Palgrave, forthcoming.]
"The Photography Project at the Gisimba Memorial Centre Orphanage
It has been almost sixty years since [Robert] Fleming etched his first photographic peace project, but across the globe old and new conflicts rage, and rifts are deepened. Pictures, mostly now digital and moving, still tell us the story of these divides. And Fleming’s is but one example of photography’s power to transform ruin into reconciliation. The Photography Project at the Gisimba Memorial Centre Orphanage in Kigali does more than document the lives of the children housed there. It offers them a chance to take charge of their own depiction. By teaching them to use cameras and allowing them to photograph each other, the program enables these children to creatively express what cannot be spoken. In the summer of 2005, American photographer and peace journalist Kresta King Cutcher visited the centre each Saturday to give photography lessons. Each of the twenty-odd children in the class was given a Kodak disposable camera. With the aid of 17-year-old Denise Kiyetesi, who translated from English into Kinyarwanda, they were invited into the magic chemistry of photographic images. Then, left to their own devices, the children quickly found willing subjects; their friends, their only family, eagerly posed.
If [Robert] Fleming’s picture exposed the ambiguity of a few eager children in postwar Germany –a world away in time, space, and culture –these African youngsters seize the moment in its vexing complexity and beauty all on their own. The older children lost their parents to the Rwandan genocide, and the younger ones have been orphaned by HIV, but they do not wait for a foreign aid worker to “shoot” their world and deliver it to them. They are not objects for a lens, but take control of both instrument and medium and become looking, living subjects all in one.
IT TAKES courage, optimism, and even a little bit of madness to think that photography can heal the yawning wounds of genocide, but if one does not dare to dream, the dream won’t dare to happen. And, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu has so famously said: 'There is no future without forgiveness.'"
Kresta King Cutcher recalls, “One Saturday, I ran out of cameras, but it didn’t matter to this young boy.”
