The ordinary heroism of refugees
Editor’s note: Molly Glentzer, the Chronicle’s ever-busy, nearly omnipresent arts writer, posts regular examinations of singular art pieces. Here is one such post. Read more at houstonchronicle.com/graymatters.
The piece: “Say Tha Mar Gyi, Myanmar” The artist: Lynsey Addario
Where: FotoFest, Silver Street Studios, through July 15
Why: According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, the world had 65.3 million displaced people in 2015. Almost a third of them, 21.6 million, were officially considered refugees. And only 107,100 were resettled.
Last December, the Pew Research Center put slightly more comprehensible numbers to the worst refugee crisis the world has ever known, reporting that nearly 1 in every 100 people on Earth are displaced from home. It’s a number that is expected to grow.
Nothing humanizes a situation, though, like a great photograph.
Who can forget Nilufer Demir’s 2015 image of the drowned 3-year-old Alan Kurdi on a beach after the boat carrying him, his family and other refugees capsized on its way to Greece? Years from now, that photo could be a 21st-century icon in the vein of Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl” from 1972 — except, of course, that Kurdi, unlike Phan Thi Kim Phúc, can’t be around when he’s grown to tell his story.
A print of Demir’s photograph is included in “Refugee,” the Annenberg Space for Photography show on view at FotoFest. But the project had even more ambitious origins: The Space dispatched five leading photographers to five continents to capture the scope of the refugee experience, from the terrifying to the hopeful.
Lynsey Addario, Omar Victor Diop, Graciela Iturbide, Martin Schoeller and Tom Stoddart all produced compelling work, bringing their own ways of working and documenting to their commissions. Everyone they met had amazing stories to share.
Addario’s photographs keep me engaged the longest. Exquisitely composed and lit with the sensibility of Old World paintings, they project both extreme intimacy and an epic narrative. She focused on the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, an ethnic minority in an ardently Buddhist country who have been called the world’s most unwanted and persecuted people.
And their plight doesn’t show signs of abating, in spite of international human rights organizations’ repeated complaints to Myanmar’s leaders that Burmese security forces have killed and raped Rohingya people and destroyed their property. More than 140,000 Rohingya fled in 2012, and many of those who did not escape still live in extreme conditions, confined to camps and subjected to forced labor.
Addario approaches the documentary format as fine art, creating images that have metaphoric possibilities. Take the pretty young woman in the image “Say Tha Mar Gyi, Myanmar.” Crouching at the kettle above a small fire in her family’s lean-to home, not quite gazing at the photographer, her hair in a pink scarf, she could be Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring.”
A few rays of light filter through the dirty air above her, like something you’d see in a religious painting: Is that hopeful, or does it emphasize the blackness of all that’s behind her, the stark reality of a home that looks less inhabitable than barns I’ve seen?
A privileged Westerner might have a hard time grasping that such conditions constitute “living.” The subject of the image is simply surviving — but heroic at the same time.