The Royal Festival Hall recently had a compelling photography exhibit called Disposable People, Documenting Contemporary Global Slavery. The photos in the exhibit were incredibly powerful exposing the injustice of slavery that is still occurring around the world.Slavery may be illegal but it's by no means defunct (even if its guises have changed). More than 27 million people are still trapped in one of the world's oldest forms of oppression. Documenting Disposable People features newly commissioned photo essays by eight renowned Magnum photographers--Ian Berry, Stuart Franklin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Chris Steele-Perkins and Alex Webb--on diverse instances of contemporary global slavery. With texts on each of these projects and an essay by expert and author Kevin Bales, this compendium explores a range of examples, including child labor in Bangladesh, sex slavery from Ukraine to Western Europe and the sexual enslavement of South Korean women by Japanese troops during the Second World War. Documenting Disposable People shows how the unfortunate emergence of a new kind of slavery is inextricably linked to the "ascent" of a global economy. - AmazonThe exhibit will make the following stops on it's tour across the United Kingdom:
Southbank Centre, London, 26 September - 9th November 2008
The Gallery, University of Plymouth, 10 January - 21 February 2009
University of Northumbria, Newcastle, 28 February – 9 April 2009
Tullie House Museum, Carlisle, 23 May - 5 July 2009
New Art Exchange, Nottingham, 1 August - 13 September 2009
Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, 7 November 2009 – 9 January 2010
A print version of the photos and essays is available through Corner House Books or Amazon.
2 comments:
Hi Dale, Thanks for the post. It was such a treat to get to work with these great photographers. The title of the show comes from my book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. We're already talking about how to build another project.
I understand how coming to grips with the size of modern slavery can leave people feeling overwhelmed. But there's an interesting paradox about the 27 million slaves in the world - yes, it is a huge number, the largest ever in human history, but it is also the smallest fraction of the human population to ever be in slavery. Likewise, the amount of money slaves pump into the world economy is big, around $50 billion a year, but it is also the smallest fraction of the global economy to ever be represented by slave labor.
The truth is that slavery has been pushed to the edge of its own extinction and working together we can tip it over the brink. I hope you'll visit and share our website - www.freetheslaves.net, and maybe look at my book on how we can bring slavery to an end in 25 years, it is called: Ending Slavery: How We Free Today's Slaves.
All best wishes,
Kevin Bales
Kevin, thanks for the comment!
The photography exhibit was very moving, and why I purchased a print version for myself.
I will definitely add your books Disposable People and Ending Slavery to my collection.
Any other future books, exhibits or projects, I'd love to hear about them!
Post a Comment