NEWS FEATURE: Jubilee Year Photo Exhibit Highlights Plight of Migrants

c. 2000 Religion News Service ROME _ Mexican peasants peer through the slats of a metal wall barring their way into the United States. Hutu refugees, bundles on their heads, trudge across a grassy hillside in a seemingly endless line. Kurdish families camp in a desolate, snow-covered valley. A sea of migrants from Bangladesh and […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

ROME _ Mexican peasants peer through the slats of a metal wall barring their way into the United States. Hutu refugees, bundles on their heads, trudge across a grassy hillside in a seemingly endless line. Kurdish families camp in a desolate, snow-covered valley. A sea of migrants from Bangladesh and the Indian countryside pours into a Bombay railroad station at rush hour.

The scenes of human suffering and survival against the odds are among 300 photographs by Sebastiao Salgado in an exhibition entitled “In Cammino” (On the Road), organized by the city of Rome as part of this year’s celebrations of the Jubilee Holy Year.


“Migration is the other face of globalization,” Italian Minister of Social Solidarity Livia Del Turco commented at the opening ceremony June 29. “Salgado makes us put hypocrisy aside.”

The show, in the Scuderie Papali al Quirinale, a newly renovated Renaissance building that once served as the stables for the papal residence on top of the Qurinal Hill, will run until Sept. 3. After Rome, it will travel to other capitals.

The exhibition stands in sharp contrast to the many other Holy Year shows in Rome and the Vatican that concentrate on the religious and social aspects of the Jubilee celebrations the Roman Catholic Church has been holding periodically for 700 years.

But the church too has taken note of the 20th-century phenomenon of mass movements of displaced persons.

Leading a special Mass in St. Peter’s Square June 2 for the Jubilee of Migrants and other itinerant people, including refugees, nomads, students and tourists, Pope John Paul II declared that racism is incompatible with Roman Catholicism and said the church upholds rights of migrants and refugees.

Several hundred demonstrators, most of them from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, seized the opportunity to dramatize their demand for residence permits from Italian authorities by marching through the center of Rome to St. Peter’s Square.

Salgado, a Brazilian who now lives in Paris, worked as an economist for the government of Brazil before turning professional photographer in 1973. His previous shows have highlighted conditions in a Paris slum, the lives of migrants in Europe and Indian peasants in Latin America, drought in the African Sahel, manual labor and population movements.


Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet, playwright and painter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, attended the opening of the exhibition as an admirer of Salgado’s work and read a new poem, “The Migrants,” which he said the photographer’s work had inspired.

Walcott said it was wrong to look at the photograph of a Jewish child with eyes “like two coals burning” on the way to a death camp or of a young Vietnamese girl fleeing down a road, her arms outstretched, her body on fire from a napalm attack, and to ask “why didn’t the photographer stop it?”

“The photographer is doing nothing more than recording original sin,” Walcott said. “The question is not, `Where is the conscience of the photographer?’ but `Where is the conscience of humanity?’,” he said. “I think that this show contributes to the question.”

In his poem, Walcott describes “the tidal motion of refugees, not the flight of wild geese” and says:

“ … now there is a monstrous map that is called Nowhere

and that is where we’re all headed, behind it

there is a view called the Province of Mercy,

where the only government is that of apples

and the only army the wide banners of barley …”

Salgado, speaking in French, said he had dedicated his exhibition to Alberto Cairo, “an Italian who gave up everything to dedicate himself entirely to the dispossessed.” He said Cairo, formerly a lawyer, now works in Afghanistan helping people who have lost limbs in land mine explosions.

The exhibition is divided into five sections, starting with “Migrants and Refugees: the Survival Instinct,” which shows Kurds, Afghans, Bosnians, Serbs, Kosovars and Palestinians living in extreme conditions.


Then come “The African Tragedy: A Continent Adrift,” “Latin America: Rural Exodus, Urban Disorder” and “Asia: the World’s New Urban Face.”

The show ends with stark photographic portraits of the “Children Today: Men and Woman of the New Centuries,” young people not yet 15 years old in countries ranging from Angola to Croatia, Mozambique to Iraq and southern Sudan to Brazil.

“This exhibition has a political and social significance,” Salgado said. “I hope that people do not come to see it in a spirit of compassion but look at the images of themselves in a mirror. Eight-five percent of humanity lives in these conditions.”

DEA END POLK

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