From Aubrey Graham:

Please come get some wine and cheese and support the opening of my exhibition: Portraits in ‘Disneyland’ – Stories from Mugunga III. I’d love to see you there! The details:

Emory Center for Ethics (bottom of the theology building on Dickey Drive)
7PM – 9PM, January 29th, 2015

The images come from my fieldwork in the eastern DRC – (2013-2014) specifically from Mugunga III internally displaced peoples camp. There I explored how the residents of the camp wished to be represented photographically.

Each photo was created in collaboration with the subject. In other words, each individual featured told me what they wanted in the image, where they wanted to be photographed, and how they wanted to look. I added somecomposition, took the image, and returned it an edited print of each shot to them the next week.

‘Disneyland’ explores the shift from subject’s expectations of me as a humanitarian photographer (I was not) to a local ‘studio-type’ photographer. In the process, it (hopefully) asks viewers to think about their own expectations of images of displacement, the Congolese, and other situations of displacement or humanitarian crisis.

In the end, humanitarian-type photography (with tropes of suffering, aid helped success or the sprawl of the situation) might not be the only way to represent an individual or a situation. For subjects and photographers alike however, it might just be the most expected.

*Exhibition will be up from the opening through the end of April 2015

**Thanks to Emory Center for Ethics, Center for Creativity and Arts, theVisual Scholarship Initiative at Emory University, and the ILA for helping get this printed and up!