What change can photodocumenting social injustice bring? Photographer Svetlana Bachevanova – Publisher of FotoEvidence, and David Stuart – Editorial Director, answer this question in a Jazz FM interview. Svetoslav Nikolov asks them about their mission to encourage documental photography, bringing to light cases of human rights violation, injustice, oppression, assault on human dignity in different societies. As the FotoEvidence team points out, “Photographs have changed not only people"s perception but, in some cases, altered the course of history”.Change requires power that may only stem from knowledge – and this is where FotoEvidence comes. This credo is fulfilled by collecting and bringing to attention photodocuments not only of situations in which we instinctively recognize injustice, but also of the way people carry that burden. These photographs do not aim to shock; they reveal, they display, they plead for mercy, for change, they prevent. The life of Bangladeshi people in the wake of a monsoon disaster, of women in Nepal with the stigma of prostitutes, of Roma in Romania, the attack on praying Muslims in front of the mosque in Sofia, the clashes between police and gangs in Kenya, and more, and more… These are focused on on
www.FotoEvidence.com.Javier Arcenillas" photodocumentary on sicarios, Latin American assassins, was this year"s winner of FotoEvidence Book Award. 59 photographers unresigned to social injustice have brought to light cases of it in their competition materials. Each year the winning project is published as an electronic monograph so that this impartial evidence can reach every corner of the globe. The first of its kind was Stephen Shames" Bronx Boys. In an essay of 120 previously unpublished photographs the author follows 20 years of the lives of young people at the epicenter of a cocaine epidemic in this area. Added is a narrative by one of the main charcters in the series - Martin Dones.The driving force behind FotoEvidence are two people with profound sensitivity to human rights violation and social injustice. Svetlana Bachevanova is among the participants in the democracy process in Bulgaria and is photographer at the first anti-communist daily – Democracy. Some of her photographs documenting events from the turbulent first months of the transition period have been used as evidence at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Editorial Director David Stuart has for years been executive director of a non-governmental organization calling for disarmament - Disarmament Action Network. As a social activist he has been carrying out educational projects and consulting NGOs.
Here you can listen to the interview with them.On the photo: Petition against assasins in Guatemala City, from Javier Arcenillas" award-winning series.
