• ENDLESS WAR
• NEVER AGAIN
• DISPLAYS OF POWER
• LIVES IN THE BALANCE

• Exhibit Introduction
• Humanist Photography
• VII Photo Agency: Origins
• Re-Envisioning The World
• Boulat Award for Photo Journalism
• Acknowlegements

Re-Envisioning the World

Sherman Teichman, Founding Director,
Institute for Global Leadership, Tufts University

The Institute for Global Leadership is honored to have worked with the VII Photo Agency and the Tufts University Art Gallery in creating the Questions without Answers exhibition. It is the first major initiative to celebrate the Institute’s 25th anniversary, resonating many of the challenging and complex issues that we have addressed over the last quarter of a century.

• Terrorism.
  • Violence.
    • Genocide.
      • Corruption.
        • Poverty.
          • Greed.
            • Fear.
              • Inequality.
                • Deprivation.
                  • Environmental Degradation.

The photographs in this exhibition provide evidence of the sensitivity, insight, and determination of VII’s photographers. Predominantly news magazine photographers of the “developed world,” they have a global sensibility that has educated us to the requirements needed not only to see, but to “re-envision” the world.

Their powerful images are critical reminders of what we too often wish to ignore or deny. As a prominent historian reminds us, we live in “an age of forgetting.” Worse, this amnesia is often accompanied by cynicism and the paralytic excuse of “inevitability.”

Questions without Answers. As educators, we are acutely aware of the difficulty of teaching and thinking about the events so starkly captured here, conundrum issues for which there are no decisive answers, nor solutions.

The Institute’s mission is to expose students to the ambiguities and complexities of the world, to encourage them to challenge their assumptions and to expand their understanding of how historical, cultural, and ideological forces affect individuals and nations.

And they are encouraged and supported to pursue careers to meet these challenges.

Many of these complex events witnessed by VII’s photographers were born of ideological certainty, which sacrificed human beings to absolutist truths. Others derived from retributive cycles of suppression, hatred, and coercion. It is as critical to question their exact causality as it is to inquire why they are so persistent and impervious to attempted solutions.

The Institute began its relationship with VII in 2004 when James Nachtwey, one of VII’s co-founders, inspired our students to create Exposure, the Institute’s photojournalism, documentary studies, and human rights program. He wrote, “I have a strong respect for the Institute’s decades of effort at understanding conflict, its causes and consequences, of the unflinching way it looks at famine, war, ethnic cleansing, and complex humanitarian emergencies.”

Exposure, which follows the Institute’s non-polemical pedagogy, carefully prepares students for immersive experiences. The stories they have documented include the lives of youth gangs in the slums of Lagos, evidence of the destruction of Islamic culture in Bosnia, and the environmental crisis faced by the island nation of Kiribati.

They have documented the impact of Colombian death squads, investigated crude oil capitalism in Azerbaijan, covered the first democratic election in Krygyzstan, and documented the livelihood challenges of pastoralists in the Karamojong Cluster of Africa.

Several of Exposure’s alumni have gone on to professional careers in the field. One provided the first images published in The New York Times on Darfur and covered military offensives in Iraq and the insurgency in the oil rich Niger Delta, twice being nominated for the prestigious Bayeux – Calvados Award for War Correspondents. Another captured the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in Pakistan and covered the battle between Islamic militants from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp and the Lebanese Army.

In its first 25 years, the Institute for Global Leadership has concentrated on conflict and iniquities, seeking to understand the dimensions and tensions of state sovereignty and personal sovereignty and the dilemmas of human rights.

Over the next years, the Institute will dedicate itself to probing structural violence and poverty -- the inequities and inequalities that challenge us as we attempt to create a more just world.

Nachtwey explained, “I believe that EXPOSURE will help us all to understand photography as a valuable tool that can help us learn how to make sense of the violence, the destruction, the chaos of this world...that, most importantly, it can help to create a public awareness integral to the process of change.”

We believe that this exhibition is an important part of that process.