Daily News Tribune
Capturing resiliency and hope: Two photo exhibits reveal the power of coping
amid war, disease
By Chris Bergeron / News Staff Writer
Sunday, August 29, 2004
WINCHESTER — Peering through their lens, two very different photographers,
Paul Mellor and Sebastiao Salgado, capture hope and humanity in distant
impoverished lands.
As photojournalists, they have little in common except a shared
artistry that transforms the grinding misery of disease and war into
striking images of endurance.
Together, Mellor and Salgado reveal photojournalism’s power to inform
and inspire in two complimentary exhibits at the Griffin Museum of
Photography in Winchester.
Mellor, a 54-year-old Englishman, journeyed to Nagorno-Karabagh, a
Christian enclave in the Caucasus Mountains which broke away from Azerbaijan
in the 1990s.
Salgado, a Brazilian with an international reputation, documented
efforts to eradicate polio in five struggling nations in Africa and the
Indian subcontinent. Now living in Paris, his works can be seen in “The End
of Polio” through Oct. 31.
Museum Director Blake Fitch said both photographers have succeeded in
bringing important stories to the world.
“Both Mellor and Salgado see the sadness people have to live with. But
they both show a glimmer of hope,” she said.
Mellor is exhibiting 20 memorable color photographs that record the
daily struggle for survival in a former Soviet republic where health care
services barely exist. Shown for the first time in the United States, the
exhibit, “Armenia & Karabagh: The Aftermath,” runs in the museum’s Emerging
Artist Gallery through Nov. 5.
By some alchemy of composition and compassion, Mellor’s work puts a
recognizable face on people caught in a conflict consigned to the margins of
public awareness. His photographs range from 20-by-14 inches to 40-by-32
inches.
A father tends his hospitalized young son with hawk-eyed vigilance. A
midwife with raw-knuckled hands waits for her next birth in a drab delivery
room. A family of six makes a home of a metal container. A woman sits in a
street corner market trying to sell a bundle of sticks.
Mellor takes photographs that present artful vignettes of people coping
with dire circumstances. Shooting from an neutral middle distance, he never
condescends to their poverty or reduces them to stereotypes.
“After surviving war and earthquakes, these people are doing the best
they can. They need help,” he said. “But, they have few resources and
there’s very little foreign investment. It’s a story the world hasn’t heard
about.”
Armenia took control of the largely Christian area of 200,000 people in
1994 after a four-year war.
Mellor has put a recognizable face on people struggling for normalcy
after a conflict that severely damaged the region’s roads, hospitals and
economy.
The exhibit’s most evocative image is Mellor’s large format photograph
of a rosy-cheeked child in a dingy room, looking with bright eyes toward a
sunlit window.
Mellor has spent nearly 35 years as a professional photographer
focusing on news, sports and commercial projects. His current show grew out
of a weeklong visit to war-torn Nagorno-Karabagh in January 2001.
Initially, he traveled with his wife, Kathy Mellor, a neo-natal nurse,
to take pictures of a hospital construction program for the relief
organization, Family Care.
Over the course of several more trips during the next three years,
Mellor found himself drawn into the lives of people coping with poverty and
neglect.
Rather than shoot digitally, he prefers the “greater latitude” of a 35
mm Canon camera that takes sharp detailed prints. “Film photography does
certain things to the imagination that digital images can’t do,” he said.
Mellor never resorts to “artsy” angles or distorted perspectives,
preferring to compose subtle visual narratives of people coping with their
circumstances. Mellor often frames his images around a single person or
small group in a room or street scene “to give viewers a strong point for
the eye to go to.” He mostly uses natural light to convey his subjects’
“depth of feeling.”
Like an photographic image emerging from a mixture of chemicals,
revealing details coalesce about the central subject, helping viewers
appreciate the complexities of life in a conflict-ridden region.
In one photo, a hospital anesthesiologist waits for her next patient in
a dingy room with outdated equipment. A sad-eyed young boy surrounds his bed
with a barricade of overturned wooden stools. Four children sit on the floor
of an empty room in a swath of sunlight.
Who are these people? Will their poverty crush them? Do they somehow
deserve their fates?
By observing his subjects with a respectful eye, Mellor invites viewers
to share their plights and, by extension, their humanity.
“When photographing these people I tried to record the sense of dignity
that had not only held the families together but was indeed the basic
ingredient for their bleak future,” Mellor wrote in a statement accompanying
the exhibit. “…The pictures are meant to convey their hope as well as
their acceptance of all that life throws at them.”
He hopes his photos raise awareness and support for relief efforts to
help the people of Nagorno-Karabagh. He and his wife are planning to return
this October. They now work with BirthLink, a charity based in England that
provides medical training and equipment to the region.
“This is an ongoing story. It doesn’t stop with this exhibit,” Mellor
said. “We will continue. We’re passionate we can make a difference.”
Salgado has achieved legendary status by creating powerful
black-and-white photographs that are startling in their polemical power and
beauty.
Initially trained as an economist, the 60-year-old global traveler has
spent three decades documenting the lives of dispossessed people around the
world.
In this exhibit, he documents the suffering and hopes of humans ravaged
by polio with an unforgiving realism.
Salgado has documented anti-polio campaigns in India, Pakistan, Sudan,
Somalia and the Congo in images that sear the soul.
An 11-year-old polio-stricken child, wearing sandals on his knees for
protection, crawls into a soccer game in Somalia. A father pours a vial of
vaccine into his son’s mouth in a railroad car in India where they’ve been
confined to prevent the disease’s spread. An emaciated Sudanese child
screams as an aide worker in a ragged shirt with a Disney logo provides
medicine.
In several memorable shots, Salgado photographs his subjects in extreme
close-ups with an immediacy that is, at once, harsh and humanizing.
Fitch said Salgado’s photos “go far beyond promoting public awareness
of a cause.”
“They grab you and force you to face the pain of others with the hope
that you will be motivated to fight for change. (Salgado’s) beautiful
pictures of people in harsh circumstances are designed to encourage us to
engage in what (he) calls ‘essential behavior,’ — doing the right thing.”
In these two impressive exhibits, Mellor and Salgado employ their
considerable artistry to show how conscience and decency can overcome
enormous obstacles.
THE ESSENTIALS:
The Griffin Museum of Photography was founded in 1992 by the late
Arthur Griffin to provide a forum for the exhibit of historic and
contemporary photography.
Mellor will give a lecture about the exhibit Wednesday, Sept. 8, at 7
p.m. Tickets are $7 for museum members and $10 for non-members.
The museum is located at 67 Shore Road, Winchester. The museum is open
Tuesday through Sunday noon to 4 p.m.
Admission is $5 for adults, $2 for seniors and free for members.
Children under 12 are admitted free. Admission is free on Thursday.
( For more information, call 781-729-1158 or visit the Web site
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