Understanding Resilience through Photography
A Photographer Teaches His Art to Refugee Youth
When the photo of Aylan Kurdi’s drowned body circulated all over the Internet, people across the world erupted in horror. The 3-year-old was one of many Syrian children who have died trying to seek asylum in Europe. Mass media has illustrated the panic and suffering that stress European borders, however we don’t see the experience through the eyes of refugees. It’s hard for outsiders to get the whole picture.
One photojournalist from Buffalo, New York offers us the opportunity to reach a deeper understanding of the effects of the Syria’a Civil War. In 2014, Brendan Bannon, 45, created “Do You See What I See?” an arts project for refugee youth in Jordan and Lebanon. Sponsored by UNHCR, Bannon taught kids how to shoot photos to tell their own stories. The kids also wrote paragraphs to caption each photo. When you look at these photographs, you begin to understand refugee life through a child’s eyes.
One of Bannon’s star students, Fatima, is a 20-year old Syrian refugee living in the Za’atari Camp of Jordan. She is a mother of three children who lost her husband when she fled the violence ravaging her home. In one of her pieces, Fatima staged a photograph of a woman mourning a dead body wrapped in a white sheet.
“This picture is very important because it is the only way I can tell the whole world,” she wrote. “I don’t ask for anyone to have mercy on me or take care of me. I only ask you to look at this picture, which shows my reality and tells the story of my life. A life which became full of funeral shrouds and grief.”
Not all of the photos are a grim as this one. The photographs show hope. We see the kids eating, playing and laughing like normal kids. Through the program, Fatima discovered that she loved writing and taking photographs of her daily life. She was so talented that Bannon trained her to be an instructor. With the community’s overwhelming support, the workshops in Za’atari still continue today with students like Fatima teaching other kids the power of art.
“I don’t know if any of these kids will become professional photographers,” said Bannon. “But I do know that photography is a great tool for teaching resilience, community building and problem solving.”
In a way, Bannon passed the torch to these kids. Though his suffering was not at the scale of a refugee, he found that photography saved him from dark times as well.
Bannon has been interested in photography since he was a kid. His mother was an amateur photographer and his father was a film critic for the Buffalo News. However, he did not start exploring photography until his 20s. Trying to cope with the deaths of close friends, Bannon picked up the camera to handle the suffering.
“It just felt like as an answer to these deaths that I wanted to stop or at least still or slow down or preserve,” said Bannon.
Shortly after, he decided to be the primary caretaker of his mother who suffered from multiple sclerosis. Photography was a way for him to stay engaged with the world and fight depression.
In 2000, he was asked to teach workshops to kids in public schools and discovered he had a passion for teaching. One workshop led to another and soon he earned a grant to teach his own workshops in Uganda. In 2008, he received another grant to run programs in Namibia and Yemen. “Do You See What I See?” is his latest project and he taught his last workshop in the spring.
Even though he loves teaching, Brendan primarily sees himself as a professional freelance photographer. He has documented areas of conflict for publications like the New York Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and various non-profit organizations. When I spoke with Brendan, he had just finished an assignment for the International Organization for Migration where he photographed the aftermath of civil war in southern Sudan.
Having worked for two types of organizations, Brendan noticed that NGOs and publications vary in the amount of time and resources they give to their freelancers.
“I think both have their pleasures and perils,” he said. “But I think the main difference is that non-profits tend to have a larger budget than editorial publications and seem to be more wiling to commit more resources to telling a story. Depending on the NGO there’s room to report more widely because you have more time. But in both cases you don’t have ultimately control of what decisions are made about the work or how it appears and where it appears.”
Despite the challenges in his profession, Bannon found that his workshops were a way to stay occupied in between jobs. More importantly, they are way for him to make a connection with the communities he visits. When on assignments, it’s hard for him to get enough time to truly interact with people. Without that familiarity, it’s hard to get those intimate, powerful shots.
“With teaching I have an opportunity to interact intensively with kids over a couple of weeks and really understand the depth of a group of individual humans living through situations like that,” said Brendan. “Teaching really underscores the need to look deeply and respectfully at all of the communities that I’m working in because these are important people going through the toughest times of their lives.”
As photographers, we often say that if our photos are not good enough, it’s probably because we are not getting close enough. Capturing a moment requires us to squeeze into intimate spaces. After talking to Brendan, I realized how challenging and important it is to really be in touch with your subjects to translate that intimacy to your audience. It takes a really critical eye.
“One of the perils of photography is that you take the world and you put it in a flat two-dimensional frame. Then you show it to people and they think that what they are seeing in that flat two-dimensional frame is a representation of reality. It is but it needs to be a complex and challenging representation because reality is complex and challenging.”
Right now, Brendan does not have any plans to teach more camp workshops because he does not have the budget or the support. However, he would love to go back and see the kids. He keeps in contact with them and wants to support them in anyway he can. This week he is taking their photos to an exhibition in Sweden where he hopes people will see the kids’ loss and longing, their joy and resilience and somehow reach a better understanding of a world that has seen so much turmoil.
