Brazil's iconic Congress building lit up by protesters

Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of several cities across Brazil Monday, including Brasilia, where they threw their shadows on the walls of the famed Congresso Nacional:

(photo by Evaristo SAEVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images)

(photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

(photo by Evaristo SAEVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images)

PHOTO: Cooling off in a heatwave

Indian school boys cool off in an inflatable swimming pool during a summer camp at a school in Amritsar on June 4. Temperatures are already hovering around the 45 degree Celsius mark. (NARINDER NANU/AFP/Getty Images)

PHOTO: Flooding in Germany

An aerial view of the flooding in Passau, Germany on Monday. Heavy rainfalls caused flooding along rivers and lakes in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. (AP Photo/dpa, Peter Kneffel)

Beauty and crisis: the photographs of Sebastiao Salgado

The Anavilhanas. Amazonas, Brazil. 2009. (Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas images)

 

Are you planning a trip to the Antarctic any time soon?  A sojourn in the jungles of Papua New Guinea? A ramble through the isolated northern Amazon?

If not, set aside a couple of hours for the Royal Ontario Museum’s journey to the ends of the Earth through the lens of Brazilian uber-photog Sebastiao Salgado.

Salgado, 69, began his career as an economist, but abandoned the ivory tower for the grassroots, trekking with his camera kit to meet the people who are on the sharp end of economic policy – the forgotten, the desperately poor, the displaced.

“I tell a little bit of my life to them, and they tell a little of theirs to me,” he says. “the picture itself is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The ROM exhibition, Genesis, is a new chapter for Salgado. Instead of chronicling hell on Earth, he spent eight years recording his view of an earthly paradise for posterity: his “love letter to the planet.”

It was a painful transition. His decades of capturing human misery had left him depressed and exhausted, ready to shelve his cameras. And returning to southeast Brazil in the 1990s he was shocked to see that not only people, but land was in crisis – the lush landscape he remembered withered and dying from unsustainable farming.

He and his wife and collaborator, Lelia Wanick Salgado, created Instituto Terra, a non-profit group that replanted nearly 2 million trees, bringing it back to vibrant life. The result led to project Genesis.

It was a gruelling but rewarding eight-year trek through the pristine beauty of remote places, both inhabited and free from human footprints.

In Russia’s unforgiving Arctic Yamal-Nenets Salgado walked 47 days with reindeer herders, telling the Guardian – with some understatement – “for a Brazilian in temperatures of -35C spending 10 or 12 hours outside wasn’t easy.”

His stark, multi-dimensional black and white photos are almost sculptural in quality. The viewer is drawn into them hypnotically. Missing are the unseen human forces that are destroying the territory they depict: pollution, globalization, overpopulation, climate change.

“I want people to understand that this is the only world we have,” Salgado told CBC. “I believe…we’ve arrived at the break-even point. From here we cannot cross. We’ve already destroyed too much.”

See this while you can.

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING:To the ends of the earth (audio);  The making of Genesis

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to South Asia and the Middle East, winning national and international awards.

PHOTO: Greater Bamboo lemur cub

An unnamed Greater Bamboo lemur (Prolemur simus), cub nestles with its mother Sorja at the Besancon Zoo in eastern France on Thursday.. There are estimated currently less than 600 of the species left in the wild. (SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP/Getty Images)

Child brides sacrificed on wedding altars

Three-year-old Sunam, wears her engagement outfit and holds hands with her fiance, her 7-year-old cousin, Nieem, in Kabul, Afghanistan, July 2007. (AP Photo/Farzana Wahidy)

Rajani was a “midnight bride,” in the rugged Indian desert state of Rajastan: one of many who are too young to marry legally, at 18, but are wedded in secret, in late night village ceremonies.  Only five, she toddled to her wedding in a pink t-shirt and plastic sun glasses. She had never met her husband-to-be, who was 10. 

Her story, reported by Cynthia Gorney in National Geographic, is not unusual in the tragic world of child brides, who may be married off to cancel family debts, solidify clan relationships, rid a poor family of an unwanted mouth to feed or avoid a daughter’s “dishonor” from male attentions as she reaches puberty.

The sorry practise is highlighted in Ottawa this week at a photo exhibition to help support young girls who are forcibly married -- and save an estimated 142 million others from meeting the same fate over the next decade.

Presented at Carleton University’s Art Gallery, it was opened on Tuesday by Foreign Minister John Baird and Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose. The travelling exhibition, launched in 2012 by the UN’s population fund and the photo agency VII, was sponsored in Canada by the government, the university and UNFPA.

Photographed by Stephanie Sinclair and Jessica Dimmock, it features award-winning images that show the horrifying reality of the daily lives of girls whose childhoods are stolen and whose futures are held captive by poverty, custom and family control.

Many are taken from school before they can read and write, isolated from their friends and families and forced into sex and childbirth at ages when both can endanger their lives. Those who survive often live in near-slavery, dying prematurely from exhaustion and preventable diseases.

The statistics are daunting.

According to the World Health Organization, about 39,000 under age girls are married every day. At current levels, that’s more than 14 million a year. And, says Rachel Vogelstein of the Council on Foreign Relations, the author of a study released this month on ending child marriage, of the 140 million or more who will marry before the age of 18, 50 million will be younger than 15.

Although India accounts for 40 per cent of known child brides, the tradition is pervasive in South Asia, Sub Saharan Africa – as well as parts of Latin America and the Middle East, Vogelstein says in her report. The top five rates of child marriage are in Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, Bangladesh and Guinea, where more than 60 per cent of brides are younger than 18.

“The practise of child marriage is a violation of human rights,” says Vogelstein. “Every day girls around the world are forced to leave their families, marry against their will, endure sexual and physical abuse, and bear children while still in childhood themselves.”

Although marriage of girls under 18 is illegal in 158 countries, those that put little value on female lives often turn a blind eye.

Occasionally, girls manage to escape -- like 10-year-old Nujood Ali of Yemen, who became world famous by turning up in a city courthouse and announcing that she wanted a divorce. Her success encouraged others, and the liberated youngsters won public applause, though five years later Nujood is still battling for her rights.

Most are not so lucky.

The struggle to end child marriage depends on ensuring that girls are educated and have opportunities to earn a living. And above all, countries must attack the root causes that devalue the lives of girls and women from cradle to grave.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, human rights and politics from the former Soviet Union to South Asia and the Middle East. An Emmy-winning film, The Selling of Innocents, was based on her reporting on trafficking of girls in India. 

PHOTO: Devotees in Mumbai

Devotees walk on a pathway made of cement bags to offer prayers at a shrine along the Arabian Sea in Mumbai on Thursday. (Danish Siddiqui/Reuters)

PHOTO: Young South Korean Buddhists

Young South Korean Buddhists have their heads shaved during a ceremony at Chogye Temple in central Seoul on Friday. Buddha's official birthday in 2013 will be celebrated on the full moon on May 17 in South Korea. (KIM JAE-HWANKIM JAE-HWAN/AFP/Getty Images)

PHOTO: Willem-Alexander becomes Dutch king

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands (front left) stands next to his wife Queen Maxima during his inauguration at the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in Amsterdam on Tuesday. (LEX VAN LIESHOUT/AFP/Getty Images)

READ MORE: Queen Beatrix abdicates: Willem-Alexander becomes Dutch king

War correspondent's professional life documented in own photos

Photojournalist Tim Hetherington was often described as “larger than life” and a visionary, but it is only in death that his vision has been fully understood.

Sebastian Junger, who produced the Oscar-nominated film Restrepo with Hetherington in Afghanistan, seems to come closest to showing what motivated his friend in his documentary Which Way Is the Front Line From Here?

The documentary follows Hetherington’s life as a war photographer from his early days in Sierra Leone to his final days in Misrata, Libya, where he was killed by mortar blast in 2011. Hetherington was 40.

In an interview, Junger spoke about his friend, his film and a war correspondent’s vexing combination of selflessness and selfishness.

“You’re doing something dramatic, glamorous and potentially deadly — and incredibly urgent and important. But (war correspondents) are also personally really complicated and sometimes messy people and you don’t realize that looking in from the outside.”

While Junger has captured his friend’s life on film, Hetherington’s own photos also chart the stages of his professional life. Reflecting on those assignments in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan and finally Libya, Junger explains how these places pushed Hetherington forward, shaped his work and helped him get closer in his quest to understand war.

- Michelle Shephard

 

SIERRA LEONE, POST-WAR, started him off in his career. I think a lot of combat reporters would yawn at the idea of doing portraits at a school for blind children … but Tim saw something very beautiful there. That was Tim, seeing the thing that everyone else was ignoring or thought was boring. … I think it also sensitized him to the consequences of war and made him curious. Why would people do this?” (Photo taken in 1999)

IT WAS INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS,” JUNGER SAYS OF HETHERINGTON'S first war reporting in Liberia. “They really weren't soldiers. They were militias filled with teenagers who were pretty out of control.” But Junger says among war correspondents there's a similar boyish thrill to being inside a war and he believes Hetherington may have discovered this in Liberia. “Addictive is too strong a word, but it makes it really irresistible at times.” (2003)

HETHERINGTON and Junger were embedded with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley — a remote 15-man outpost considered the most dangerous posting in the war — while filming “Restrepo,” named after a medic who had been killed. The photo shows a soldier screaming with pain after getting a “pink belly” for his birthday. Each member of the platoon struck his stomach until blood could be seen. “That fraternal bond was absolutely possible, so I think for the first time Tim felt he was becoming more and more indistinguishable from the guys we were covering,” said Junger. “We identified with them tremendously, which I know is a huge journalistic no-no, but we weren't trying to be objective, we were trying to understand their experience. That was very different for both of us.” (2008)

HETHERINGTON'S DEATH PUSHED JUNGER TO STOP REPORTING FROM war zones. Hetherington had often said he wanted to stop and before he left for Libya he told friends he didn't intend to go to the front line. “But it has a huge gravitational pull,” said Junger. “I know exactly how he felt, ‘Oh my God it's all happening right there. We have complete access. Let's go.' He went because it's exciting — in a word. He went because it's incredibly exciting.” Hetherington took this picture in Misrata after a fierce fight between rebels and army soldiers. It was his last photograph. (2011)

 

Documentary show time: May 4, 4 p.m. at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema