EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS CHILDREN’S
RIGHTS IN SOUTH AFRICA
February 14–May 28, 2007
Children's Visions and Voices
Exploris Museum,
201 E. Hargett Street, Raleigh, North Carolina
Children's Visions and Voices
features photographs by Alex Fattal, a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow
in South Africa from February 2003 until August 2004, as well as
photographs by the children with whom he worked. The
Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program is a project of the Center
for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University. Each year, Lewis
Hine Fellows are sent to placements domestically and abroad to work
with local organizations to document social justice issues over
the course of ten months. They then return to work with documentarians
at CDS to further develop their projects.
Alex Fattal, in collaboration with the Children’s Rights Centre
in South Africa, worked closely with children and communities across
the country to develop a traveling exhibition titled Children's
Visions and Voices: Rights and Realities in South Africa.
This exhibit has made South Africans more aware of the multitude
of complex issues facing children in their own country. (For an
on-line viewing of some of this work, go to http://cds.aas.duke.edu/hine/fattal.html.)
The exhibition has traveled for two years to eleven venues across
South Africa, from galleries to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg
to a health and population research institute in rural Kwa Zulu-Natal,
and also to the United Nations in Geneva. More than 30,000 viewers
have seen the exhibit. It continues to stimulate discussion about,
and advocate for, children’s rights in South Africa.
“Alex Fattal is a young, talented social observer with a camera
who has been welcomed into homes, schools, and neighborhoods across
South Africa to document the lives of children. His photographs
and writing—along with the words and images he elicited from
children themselves—have helped South Africans to see beyond
statistics and to understand the notion of children’s rights
in a very human and personal way,” said Alex Harris, founder
and creative director of the Hine Fellows Program and a professor
a Duke University. “We present this exhibition in the U.S.
as an example of extraordinary documentary work that shares stories
powerfully recorded in South Africa in ways that will resonate with
Americans, suggesting the numerous difficulties facing American
children that have been overlooked or ignored in the past."
The production of this U.S. exhibition of Children's
Visions and Voices is jointly supported by the Lewis Hine
Documentary Fellows Program at the Center for Documentary Studies
at Duke University and The Concilium on Southern Africa at Duke
University.
The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program is supported by the Bernard
van Leer Foundation, the Philanthropic Initiative, and the Jennifer
Jessica Cohen Foundation. Lewis Hine Fellows are selected each spring
from a highly competitive pool of graduates of Duke University and
of the Continuing Studies Certificate Program at the Center for
Documentary Studies.
banner image:
Partial view of the Lyndhurst Gallery, one of four exhibition spaces
at CDS. Photograph by Christopher Sims.
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