1st Emily Schiffer
USA
“Cheyenne river”
In 2005, I founded a photography program for youths on Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. In this ongoing program, my students and I photograph together, share our images while they’re still in the viewfinder, and operate as both subjects and photographers. Our favorite locations are the fields and abandoned buildings on the fringes of town, forgotten places thick with the past that lend themselves to imaginary games and textured photographs. The absence of an adult presence is evident in both the children’s play and our images. The 500 inhabitants of Dupree, SD are confident in the area’s relative safety. Children explore freely, and develop a community of young people that operates without adult involvement. My images explore play as a vehicle through which youth reveal and negotiate their emotions, traumas, and desires. Children have a unique ability to experience love and joy alongside pain without compartmentalizing their experiences. I seek to convey this complexity. Over the course of four years, my students and I have documented our relationships with one another and this land. The validity and meaning of my images are linked to the shared context of their creation. Therefore, my work will be exhibited alongside the children’s photographs, which present the other parts of the whole. The design of a group exhibition represents the next phase of this program. In summer 2010, I plan to host six committed teenage photographers and two adults in New York City. The purpose of this visit is to expose the youth and elders to ideas of representation: the artist’s intent, and the viewer’s perceptions. We will tour museums and galleries, and meet with artists and curators. This artistic exposure is designed to inspire the creation of a photographic instillation that will enable the viewer to interact with our images and form relationships with our photographic subjects. Currently, my students, their families, and I are engaged in a fundraising campaign to support this next stage. We hope to reach a wide audience at home and abroad.
2nd Giovanni Cocco
ITALY
“Monia”
Monia è mia sorella. A causa di un errore durante il parto dovuto all’uso del forcipe, è disabile dalla nascita. Un probabile schiacciamento del cranio ha arrecato danni celebrali permanenti. Aveva sei anni quando i miei se ne accorsero, adesso ne ha 39 ma è come se fosse rimasta a sei. Non è del tutto autosufficiente. Vive con i miei genitori, a Sulmona, in Abruzzo.
La sua vita si svolge soprattutto in casa e mia madre si occupa di lei da sempre. Ha sacrificato la sua vita per lei. Tutta la famiglia ha modificato la sua vita per lei e l’amore intenso che che ci dà Monia ha creato delle unioni speciali.
Monia è dolce, solare, affettuosa e pura. A modo suo comunica con me e con le persone e a modo suo esprime le sue emozioni. E’ difficile descrivere, a chi non lo viva, l’importanza di questo legame, fatto di codici, di silenzi, di sguardi, di vecchio giochi e di nuovi modi di stare insieme. Per questo ho iniziato questo lavoro alcuni anni fa in silenzio. E’ ancora un work in progress. Non so quando avrà termine. Per adesso è una necessità e la voglia di raccontare la condizione di fratello di persona disabile, perchè si parla certamente dei genitori di un disabile e quasi mai di fratello o sorella. Essere suo fratello è un’esperienza determinante e certamente una consizione che mi accompagnerà per tutta la vita.
3rd Lea Meilandt
DENMARK
“The Maguires”
The number of homeless families in the US has grown rapidly since the beginning of the global financial crisis in 2007.
While parents struggles to make ends meet because of unemployment and expensive housing, children are often neglected and forgotten.
The Maguire family knows what its like to loose everything.
For several months they lived in a shelter, because they could not afford the expensive housing in Boston. Now helped by the state Katie and Bill and their five kids have a small house in Medford, just outside of Boston. But the economy of the family is still far from good. Bills job barely pays for rent, and daycare is with its extremely high cost out of the question. This means that Katie has to stay in the house all day with the kids unable to work and earn money.
The vulnerability of the economic situation has a huge impact on the Maguire family. Katie and Bill are exhausted. They constantly worry about loosing the house, and not being able to give the children a safe home.
4th Antonio De Mesa
SPAIN
“Oedipus”
Every family is a conflict zone. Mine is too. I feel like a war photographer when I take my camera to picture my little son and my beautiful daughter. For a reason I cannot understand I’m at the front line of an unexpeced War. A War for Love. But in the end, a War is a War, and I’ve come to realize than my little compact camera is a wonderful weapon to bring peace to the conflict. There is a place in between childhood and adulthood. A place where we are all “body snatchers”. And that’s where families grow…
5th Paolo Marchetti
ITALY
“Spots of Kerala”
In south India, Kerala state, an amazing place named “the private land of God”.
Every year thousands of people being disowned and abandoned on the streets by their families: the mentally ill or just suffering from depression that very often they take refuge in alcohol which affects the mental health, and increase the number of alcoholics in this country, the highest of the entire Indian sub-continent.
Also it is again too much frequently find the so-called illegal children in the streets, those conceived outside of marriage that may permanently impair the credibility of relatives in the prosperous market of weddings still in force.
Kerala has the highest number of suicides around the world and it seems that the main cause is due the collapse of emotional people who have stood the pressure of an abrupt economic development in Kerala that is leading in recent decades.
Market rules of marriage provide that girls, apart from being spotless, should not have relatives “uncomfortable”.
For instance, having a relative who suffers from mental illness or alcoholism, is a spot to hide and delete if you want to have any chance to find a husband, any form of weak due to their relatives is considered contagious.
For a father having a daughter is to have a duty to buy an husband, in fact, marriage is a transaction of sale and purchase managed by head of household and this is done regardless of the views of the future spouses who frequently do not even know.
Women must, by definition, pay the dowry to her husband.
Special Award given by journalist’s Jury Carlo Gianferro
ITALY
“A pranzo con i morti
Una città di circa 175mila persone.
Una città di 200 ettari, una delle più vaste d’Europa, immersa nel verde, composta da innumerevoli fazzoletti di terra recintati posti uno accanto all’altro.
L’aria è satura di odori. delicati profumi di fiori si mescolano alle acre essenze degli incensi e delle candele.
Una città sempre silenziosa interrotta , di tanti in tanto, da solitarie urla e angoscianti pianti.
Una città dove il lento correre del tempo rimane sempre perpetuo e solo ,per una volta l’anno, si riempie di suoi futuri frenetici cittadini.
Per due giorni all’anno dopo una settimana della Pasqua ortodossa i morti dei cimiteri moldavi si riuniscono alla famiglia per trascorrere alcune ore in allegria.
I parenti arrivano sereni e sorridenti, colmi di tovaglie e cibo e imbandiscono la tomba pronti per il pranzo con i morti.
Il prete passa tra le strette stradine e con le famiglie prega e benedice i rotondi ciambelloni (Colac) con candele lunghe e strette accese sulla sommità e versa un bicchiere di vino nella terra accanto alla lapide. Alla fine del rito gli ospiti del defunto si siedono attorno alla tomba o ad un tavolo accanto e iniziano a mangiare chiacchierando e ridendo rumorosamente alla salute del loro caro.
È una festa molto allegra e vivace ma anche spirituale. I morti non sono solo da piangere e rimpiangere ma anche da incontrare e farli partecipare ancora nella quotidianità della vita famigliare.
I defunti non parlano ma dall’alto guardano, partecipano e ringraziano.
