ART | Envisioning Human Rights: 39 striking photos over 40 years from eminent photographers.
American exceptionalism–the notion that we are unique among nations–sometimes causes us to undertake unrealistic, hubristic missions, and then to recoil in alarm to an isolationist belief in tending our own gardens. We have our own problems and can’t police the world, goes the refrain–which has its merits, but goes too far. In a global economy in which we are no longer as overwhelmingly dominant as even 10 or 20 years ago, we can not afford to indulge in fantasies of Fortress America, nor would any of us seriously want the country to forsake whatever moral status we have historically claimed (with varying degrees of accuracy). We’d probably like, in fact, more walking the walk and less talking the talk.
Activist: Aung San Suu Kyi by Dunlop. © Nic Dunlop.
Walking the global walk are the photojournalists who bring back powerful images from other countries. Even in the digital age, with cell phone cameras ubiquitous, and thus the whole world always potentially watching, the conflation of dramatic subject matter with compelling aesthetic form by professional witnesses remains crucially important and potentially influential. It’s also dangerous, so those who risk their lives when necessary to tell stories should be honored.
Envisioning Human Rights, a current photo exhibition at the UC Berkeley’s Law School’s Boalt Hall (at Bancroft and Piedmont), does just that. The Human Rights Center researches war crimes and other violations of international human rights laws. Celebrating the nonprofit’s 20th anniversary, this beautifully installed show is displayed on the second floor of Boalt in the lobbies (Johnson and Storey) adjoining the Main Reading Room (Room 222), adjacent, appropriately enough, to Botero’s huge 2005 painting, “Abu Ghraib 57,” on loan from the Berkeley Art Museum.
Curated by artist Pamela Blotner, with the assistance of designer Elizabeth Addison, Berkeley Art Museum Curator Lucinda Barnes, Berkeley Law Associate Dean Kathleen Vanden Heuvel, and The Light Room, the show features a selection of 39 photo in black and white and color shot over the past 40 years by Mimi Chakanova, Nic Dunlop, Stephen Ferry, Stephen Goldblatt, Ken Light, Susan Meiselas, Thomas Morley, Gilles Peress, Sebastião Salgado, and Jean-Marie Simon. Depicting labor exploitation, racial discrimination, human trafficking, and genocide in troubled spots in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Iraq, Moldova, Burma, Uganda, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Brazil, as well as (lest we forget) rural poverty in Mississippi, the photos are sobering enough, yet striking as well, with aesthetic appeal reinforcing the political content. Particularly memorable for this viewer were images that are almost universally accessible: Gilles Peress’ poignant 1993 “Forced Separation, Bosnia and Herzegovina,” with the hands of family members reaching out to touch the bus window standing between them; Sebastião Salgado’s 1986 depiction of conflict between a striker and a policeman in “Gold Mine of Serra Peladra, Brazil,” with the muscled laborer grasping the rifle barrel pointed at him; Susan Mesiselas’s 1992 “Widow at Mass Grave in Koreme, Iraq,” with an old woman contemplating a pit, excavated to reveal a tangle of skulls and skeletons, one of them still wearing a boot, in a barren patch of land separated from a grassy field by a makeshift wall of concrete blocks; Thomas Morley’s 2004 “Acholi Boy with Toy Gun, Uganda,” with the young teen, a plastic pistol hanging from a string necklace, calmly regarding the camera; Stephen Goldblatt’s “Painting the Buddha’s Lips, Burma,” with a young man dangling on a rope, refreshing the color on a colossal smiling statue; Ken Light’s “Abandoned Plantation Shack, United States,” with its hovel sprouting branches and sinking into the landscape; Mimi Chakarova’s “Cristina’s Family Photo, Moldova,” with the faded photo of a little girl leading viewers to wonder how she fared later as a young woman; and Nic Dunlop’s 1996 portrait, “Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma,” with the activist turned to the left, arms crossed, looking both out at the viewer, and, perhaps, inward, in thought.
The pictures do not always tell the whole story, however, as I learned from a talk with curator Pamela Blotner, a fount of knowledge about the images. Jean-Marie Simon’s 1997 “Army Directing the Annual Mayan Festival, Guatemala” depicts villagers dressed in traditional garb flanked by soldiers in camouflage uniforms, so it’s tempting to see this as a scene of repression, erroneously: The village men in their white pants, red jackets, and straw hats bear rifles and seem to be listening to instructions from a smiling officer. Stephen Ferry’s 1992 “Miners, Calvario Market, Bolivia,” and Sebastião Salgado’s 1975 “Demonstration in Support of MPLA, Angola” suggest sinister interpretations, but the facts are more benign: Even good pictures benefit from the context provided here by succinct wall labels.
All the photos will be auctioned to benefit the Human Rights Center and its student fellowship program. Please see HRC.berkeley.edu, e-mail hrc@berkeley.edu, or call 510-642-0965 for further details. Information about this specific show is EnvisioningHumanRights.com. A related show of human-rights artworks by UC system students, Envisioning Human Rights: The Next Generation, was on display in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in September.
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DeWitt Cheng is The Monthly’s art critic.
