Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Photo exhibit delves into child poverty

from the News Press, Florida



This 8-year-old Diver has the hands of an 80 year old. They've been damaged from chemicals in the landfill.

Photo exhibit delves into child poverty

by by Charles Runnells

Chip Hoffman had never seen such staggering poverty in his life: Poor Dominican kids wandering the garbage heaps, barefoot, digging for metal scraps to sell. Their hands wrinkled and scarred from who knows what chemicals in the trash.

"Seeing this, you begin to realize how privileged you are," the North Fort Myers photographer says. "You stand there in absolute shock.

"Tears start running down your face."

Once the tears dried, Hoffman set to work photographing those 8- and 10-year-old kids called Divers. As in diving in the trash heaps.

The result - along with other photos he shot in Santiago, Dominican Republic - will be shown for the next two weeks at Arts for Act Gallery. The show benefits FGCU Spanish/German professor Ingrid Martinez-Rico, who was injured in a February car crash.

Martinez-Rico and her husband, Craig Heller, started the yearly trips to the Dominican Republic as a way for Spanish students to immerse themselves in the language - and also to gain an appreciation for how many people live.

"Most of those students have never been out of the United States, let alone gone to the Third World," Heller says.

Heller and Martinez-Rico have organized the spring break trips for eight years. They work with Accion Callejera, a Dominican nonprofit group that helps children living and working in the streets.

In March 2007, their friend Hoffman came along and brought his Nikon digital camera. He taught the street kids how to take photos, and later documented the poverty he saw there. Shoe shine boys working the streets. A river polluted with feces and chemicals. Families living atop a landfill in "La Mosca" - loosely translated, "The City of Flies."

"There's a smell there I can't even begin to describe," Hoffman says. "You can't get it out of your clothes."

Link to full article. May expire in future.

No comments: