Title:
Q&A With Lisa Kristine, Photographer of Slaves
The most pernicious lie still taught in elementary school is that
slavery ended in 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.
The truth is more disturbing. Today, 146 years later, slavery is
rampant, both in the U.S. and abroad. It lives in the dusty, pitch-black
mine shafts of Ghana, where young men are sent to chip for gold, in the
scorching brick kilns of India, where children spend endless hours
lugging bricks, behind the hidden walls of
San Francisco's massage parlors, where young girls are forced to perform sexual services.
According
to the non-profit organization Free the Slaves, 27 million people are
currently enslaved. Who are they? Lisa Kristine was determined to find
out.
The
acclaimed photographer spent a year traveling the world—from Ghana to
India to Nepal—photographing slaves, recording their stories. Her new
book,
Slavery,
presents those stories with hauntingly memorable images: the cracked,
dried fingers of a young slave stricken with malaria, the glimmer in the
eyes of an eight-year-old boy still hoping to be free.
Kristine
spoke with me about the people she met, the cruelty she witnessed, and
what every reader can do to help bring slavery to an end.
Kors: In your first two books,
A Human Thread and
This Moment,
you photograph the vibrant, joyous colors of indigenous people:
warriors dancing in Papua New Guinea, young men in Thailand splashing
around in a lake with elephants. Now slavery.
Kristine: Quite a contrast, isn't it?
Kors: It is. What got you interested?
Kristine:
Well, I was presenting my photos at the Peace Summit in Vancouver when I
was introduced to one of the founders of Free the Slaves. He said there
are 27 million slaves in the world right now. That freaked me out. I've
been to a lot of countries, and I never saw slavery. Did I overlook it?
Did I not realize what I was seeing? Twenty-seven million people. The
whole thing lit a fire under me that I just couldn't get rid of. Finally
I bought a ticket to Los Angeles, met with the organization's directors
and told them I wanted to step up. I wanted to tell these people's
stories.
Kors: Tell me a little about
Free the Slaves?
Kristine:
They're an amazing organization with partners in India, Nepal, Ghana.
Their work is going in and freeing people. Sometimes you have people who
don't even know they are slaves, people working 16, 17 hours a day in
awful conditions with no pay. This has been their whole lives, working
all day breaking rocks or dyeing silk. They have nothing to compare it
to. The organization comes in, gets them lawyers and a set-up where they
can profit from their own work.
Kors: This is not a life people choose.
Kristine:
Absolutely not. These are young men, boys, who are under threat of
violence. They can't walk away. A lot of them are born into it based on
their parents' debt. It's generation after generation.
Kors: Most people think slavery is over.
Kristine:
(Kristine laughs.) I know. When people think of slavery, they think of
an era from the distant past. Grainy photographs from Civil War times.
And yet it goes on. The New York Times just did
a chilling piece
about sex slavery in Oakland. They reported that between 100,000 to
300,000 American children are sold into sex slavery every year. It's all
around us. But people don't see it.
Kors: Maybe these photos can change that.
Kristine:
I hope so. Because when people find out what's going on, their attitude
changes. I've seen this issue light a fire under people the way it did
with me.
Kors: You spent a year on this project.
Kristine: Yes, all 2010 in Nepal, Ghana, the brick kilns in India.
Kors: Tell me about those kilns.
Kristine:
Oh, it was like walking into Dante's inferno: 120, 130 degrees. So hot
that my camera would cease to function, and I couldn't touch it because
the metal would burn my hands. The slaves would take the bricks from the
kiln, stack the bricks on their heads, then load them onto the trucks
to be carted away. Most of the slaves were women, young girls. They were
covered in dust, and it was constantly getting into their lungs.
Kors:
Didn't you want to reach out to those girls and say, "I'm taking you
with me." Or at least, "Here's $20. Pay off your debt. Now you can be
free."
Kristine: Of course there's that urge. But
I was given very strict instructions not to give any money, that that
is not the way to create change. Think about the women who are taken
from their families and forced into the sex industry. A raid come and
frees you. You're rescued. Well, you're still separated from your
family. You're stained with the social shame of having been a sex slave,
and you have no education. Nobody's going to hire you to do anything
else. Women freed under those circumstances slip back into slavery very
quickly. ... What's needed is to give these women an education and a
sense that they are human, that they deserve better.
Kors:
Looking at your photos, I kept thinking about the history textbooks I
read in school and why those failed while your book succeeds. In the
textbooks, slavery was an issue, an amorphous political problem. Your
book is about real people—not an issue, but individuals. Like Kofi.
Kristine: Oh, Kofi. He's so cute, isn't he?
Kors: He is. Tell me about him.
Kristine:
A man had come to his family's home, told his parents, "We'd like to
bring your son to a wonderful school, give him a great education." The
broker takes the son, sells him to the slave owners at Lake Volta, then
disappears. Lake Volta, in the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana, is the
largest man-made lake in the world. Children are stolen from all over to
work in the lake, heading out in boats, dragging back nets filled with
fish that weigh over 1,000 pounds. The nets often get tangled, so the
slave owners will throw the children overboard to untangle the nets. Few
of the children know how to swim. Every child I met knew another slave
who had drowned.
Kors: But Kofi is recovering.
Kristine:
Yes, he was rescued by a partner of Free the Slaves. I met him at a
shelter, and he spent a lot of time bouncing on my knee. He has now been
reunited with his parents. I think he's going to be fine.
Kors: Abeiku is also free.
Kristine:
Yes, though you can still see the scars on Abeiku's face. His owner
threw hot cooking oil onto his face, punishment for speaking up. He had
been beaten severely for many years before being rescued. For a long
time at the shelter, he wouldn't talk. He had been raped. And at the
shelter, they had to separate him from the other kids after he tried to
be aggressively sexual.
Kors: Most of the people
in your photos are still enslaved. I think of that miner, looking into
the camera, those sad, deadened eyes surrounded by darkness.
Kristine:
I remember taking that photo. That miner, he was 44 years old. Been
working down in the mine shaft for 15 years. When the gold rush
occurred, people from all over Ghana came storming in, thinking this was
their break. They were going to make it rich. Brokers come in and say,
"I'll give you $70. You come work at my mine, and you can pay me back."
The men sign their names, and now, with the massive interest, they have a
debt they can never pay off.
Kors: These are illegal mines.
Kristine:
Right. These are mines that have been shut down and abandoned. Most of
the gold has already been extracted. And because they're illegal, if any
of the miners get caught by police, they'll get arrested. ... Just
photographing it was a dangerous operation. We got in a van, which
headed into the jungle. Soon as we stepped out, the van disappeared. We
cut a long, winding path through the jungle, wading through rivers that
were waist-high, until we reached a canyon with hundreds of slaves.
There was a quarry with these mineshafts. I took my camera and crawled
in. The shaft was three feet by three feet, extending hundreds of feet
into the ground. It was pitch black, there's no oxygen pumped down
there, and it is was hot. Some of the slaves stay down there for 24, 48,
72 hours at a time. And when they come up, they're holding a sack
loaded with rocks, climbing the shaft's ladder, rung by rung, with one
hand.
Kors: You must have been scared out of your mind.
Kristine:
(Kristine exhales.) It's strange. I should have been but I wasn't. ...
As I descended, I had one hand on my camera, the other on the rungs of
the ladder. I could feel my hand slipping. And if you fall, you're dead.
There are no safety mechanisms down there. It was dark and eerie, like
descending into The Twilight Zone. ... I think part of my calm was the
men I was with. Manuru especially. He has been in the mines for 10
years, since he was 9 years old. That's when his father died. His uncle
then took him and headed to the mines. After a few years of mining, his
uncle died of a lung disease, like a lot of the miners. Now it's just
him.
Kors: Let me say something offensive that
many readers might secretly be thinking. They're thinking, "Look, it's
sad that slavery still exists. But the photos in her book are all from
other countries. Most of the slaves are black. And a lot of the pics
were taken in Africa, which is basically an unfixable disaster. I can't
really do anything about it anyway. So I'm turning on
Jersey Shore."
Kristine:
Right. "It's them, not us. Who cares?" I think it's very easy to turn
your head away from something troubling like this, to dismiss it and
say, "These people are separate from us." But they're not. The stones in
your driveway may have come from the slaves who spend all day breaking
rocks because it's cheaper for the company to get them from India, where
the labor is free. We are all connected. And we all have human value.
That's what my work is about.
Kors:
But do you think there's a racial component here? Jaycee Lee Dugard was
essentially enslaved, and the public reaction was ferocious. The
slavery of these people: virtual silence.
Kristine:
I think everyone saw Jaycee as the girl next door. People freaked out
thinking this had happened in the suburbs, in their own backyard. I
don't know if they related to her because she was white.
Kors:
Maybe not. I just wondered if you had thought about these racial
issues, especially since your children were adopted from abroad.
Kristine:
That's right. My son, who is five, was adopted from Ethiopia. My
daughter was adopted from Guatemala. Her parents died of typhoid and
malaria. We got her from an orphanage. They are the lights of my life.
Kors:
When you met the boys in the gold mines of Ghana and the girls lugging
stones in Nepal, did you think, this could have been my son. This could
have been my daughter.
Kristine: I thought, this could have been anyone's son and anyone's daughter. Under different circumstances, this could have been me.
Kors:
What makes your photos so amazing is the way you capture the eyes: the
hope, the pain, the anger, sorrow and eventually, after years of
captivity, a vacant, dead expression. Kevin Bales and Jolene Smith,
co-founders of Free the Slaves, say it best in the intro to your book:
"The eyes are the last part of a person to be devoured by slavery."
Kristine:
It's true. After a few years, their eyes glaze over, and the light
dims, as if their soul is turning off. From the eyes alone, you can
almost tell how many years they've been enslaved.
Kors: I'm wondering if you saw the documentary
War Photographer, a stunning film about acclaimed photojournalist James Nachtwey.
Kristine: I did see it. Nachtwey is one of my favorites.
Kors: Well,
he says something
in that film that really stayed with me. He says, "If war is an attempt
to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite
of war."
Kristine: It can. Absolutely it can. Of
course, it depends on who's holding the lens. I didn't come to Ghana to
document horrors for their own sake. I came to show that these children
still had dignity—and to put that on film.
Kors: Do you consider yourself a journalist?
Kristine: No, I don't. I see myself as a witness to humanity.
Kors: Have any of the slaves seen the photos?
Kristine:
Not yet. I gathered some of the photos and will be sending them back in
packages. But it's tricky. If these pictures fall into the wrong hands,
there could be severe consequences. If a slave holder sees them, some
of the children could be hurt.
Kors: I love that
at the end of your book, there's an entire page devoted to easy ways
readers can make a difference: in a minute, with a day, by devoting a
week, or a lifetime. Because even readers horrified by these photos will
say, "But what can I do?"
Kristine: And the truth is, we can make a difference. Each of us has a lot more power than we think.
Kors: I love the warning under the "Devoting a Lifetime" section: "Warning: your life may become filled with meaning."
Kristine:
(Kristine laughs.) That's right. This is a book about hope. People will
look into Kofi's eyes, see the water droplets on his forehead, the hint
of a smile, and realize that after being liberated, there is a positive
future waiting for him. This is a book about what's possible. ... But
we can't just wish an awful thing away. We have to make it happen.
To read more or to help -please visit: Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-kors/test_51_b_914177.html
Credit: Author -Joshua Kors / Photographer -Lisa Kristine, Photographer of Slaves
Paulina Opoku-Gyimah says: Is this for REAL??????
