Exhibit Opening and Reception
Love After Loss
Photographs of Children in Ethiopia by Elena Rue
Tuesday, September 16, 5-6 p.m.
Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, West Campus, Duke University
On display through January 9, 2009

Love After Loss, an exhibit of photographs of children in Ethiopia, will be displayed at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, from September 16, 2008, to January 9, 2009. An opening reception at the institute, on September 16, 5–6 p.m., is free and open to the public.

The exhibit features photographs by Elena Rue, a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow based in Ethiopia from January to October 2006. The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program is a project of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University. Each year, Hine Fellows are sent to placements domestically and abroad to work with local organizations to document humanitarian issues over the course of ten months. They then return to work with documentarians at CDS to further develop their projects.

Elena Rue, in collaboration with Hope for Children (HFC) in Ethiopia, worked closely with orphaned children living in group homes. HFC, started six years ago by an Ethiopian woman in response to the rapidly growing number of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, provides support to more than 700 children. The homes offered by HFC are the size of a traditional Ethiopian family (6-8 children), and each is headed by a group home mother. Rue spent time in seven of these group homes during the nine months that she worked in Ethiopia. This exhibit attempts to give a window into the lives of Ethiopian children and a sense of this remarkable and effective response to the overwhelming problem of HIV and AIDS. (For an on-line view of some of Rue’s work, go to http://cds.aas.duke.edu/hine/rue.html.)

“Elena Rue brings us close to the experiences of these Ethiopian children. She has made color photographs so penetratingly beautiful that we can see beyond the crisis that has engendered these expressions, see far and deep enough to recognize our common humanity,” said Alex Harris, founder and creative director of the Hine Fellows Program and a professor at Duke University.

The production of this exhibition is supported by the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program receives additional support from the Philanthropic Initiative and the Jessica Jennifer 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.






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Partial view of the Lyndhurst Gallery, one of four exhibition spaces at CDS. Photograph by Christopher Sims.


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