Quantcast
Channel: Greg Constantine – PDNPulse
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

How Greg Constantine Keeps a Human Rights Story in the Public Eye, and the News Cycle

0
0
An outdoor exhibition of Greg Constantine's photographs in the Plaine de Plainpalais park in central Geneva. Photo courtesy Greg Constantine.

An outdoor exhibition of Greg Constantine’s photographs in the Plaine de Plainpalais park in central Geneva. Photo courtesy Greg Constantine.

For more than a decade, photographer Greg Constantine has worked to document the lives of stateless people—people who have no nationality and are denied basic human rights—in places such as Sri Lanka, Kenya, Malaysia and Ukraine. Constantine has also photographed Burma’s Rohingya Muslims, hundreds of thousands of whom live as refugees in Bangladesh, who are trapped “in a cycle of misery that has no borders,” he writes in a statement about his work.

Creating photographs is just the start for Constantine. By exhibiting his work in cities all over the world, and by engaging with universities and non-governmental organizations, Constantine has developed a unique and effective approach to building an audience for a serious topic.

Developing new methods for getting his work out is essential, says Constantine, who is exhibiting his Rohingya photographs through May 28 at PowerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, and is participating in a panel discussion about Burma and the Rohingya at the Open Society Foundations on May 18. Traditional media outlets tend only to cover the plight of the Rohingya during tragedies. In the past two weeks, the Rohingya have been in the news because a mass grave was discovered at a human trafficking camp in Thailand, while other traffickers, fearing a crackdown, abandoned trafficking boats, stranding thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshis at sea, prompting global media coverage. “Whenever something really tragic happens it pops up in the news and then it just kind of evaporates,” Constantine notes.

By exhibiting his work, and by building programing around his exhibitions with universities, NGOs and other civil society organizations, Constantine has been able to gain attention for his Rohingya work outside the cycle of tragedy reporting. When he exhibits the photographs, newspapers and magazines report on the exhibition and publish the images, he says.

For instance, when he showed the work in Kuala Lampur last month during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, “all of the major English-speaking newspapers in Kuala Lumpur [ran] one-page or two-page features,” Constantine says. This is “more space and publicity, and more awareness that people are going to receive about the Rohingya” than he would be able to generate by seeking publication of a human rights story.

His exhibitions and events also give local NGOs and human rights organizations a rallying point. “One of the things that is missing a lot of times in their efforts is—it may sound cliché—adding some type of human face to this very important issue,” he says. “Exhibitions like this and programs like this, they provide this really interesting point of departure for engaging discussion.”

Constantine developed his strategy after touring middle- and high schools throughout the U.S. in 2012 to talk about his long-term project documenting statelessness. During that tour, done in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Constantine helped create discussion and debate, and connected directly with viewers. That experience was “incredibly rewarding,” he says, and it also opened his eyes to the potential of engaging with academic audiences.

He used that strategy to secure a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, which has helped him share his work with academic audiences and the general public in strategic locations around the world: He’s exhibited the work at he Atrium Gallery at the London School of Economics; European Parliament in Brussels; an old, unused bank in central Bangkok; galleries in Jakarta and Tokyo; and a park in Geneva. He’s also projected the work on the exterior of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. “It’s an exhibition, but it’s more like an engagement program,” Constantine says of his approach. “A physical exhibition… is used as a centerpiece for a bunch of side events to orbit around.”

He adds, “With these kinds of stories that deal specifically with human rights and really hard-hitting injustices and social issues, the fact is that [photographers] have to think at a creative level that’s outside of what we’re used to,” he says. “For me, utilizing universities as a way to get the work out there to a different audience has been really effective. And that to me has been something I never thought about prior to two years ago.”

The post How Greg Constantine Keeps a Human Rights Story in the Public Eye, and the News Cycle appeared first on PDNPulse.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Latest Images

Trending Articles



Latest Images