Since some people disagreed with my decision to post a picture of a dead child prominently on this site (in reference to the Bhopal disaster), I thought I would use another entry to try and convey the importance and the power of photography to address social issues.

The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, which is the first major, of the many organizations giving nods to the year’s best films leading up to the Oscars, announced its 2004 awards yesterday. The Best Documentary award went to Born into Brothels, a documentary about the children of prostitutes in Calcutta’s red light district. This should make it a frontrunner for the Oscar as well.

The most stigmatized people in Calcutta’s red light district, are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother’s fate or for creating another type of life.

In Born into Brothels, directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman chronicle the amazing transformation of the children they come to know in the red light district. Briski, a professional photographer, gives them lessons and cameras, igniting latent sparks of artistic genius that reside in these children who live in the most sordid and seemingly hopeless world.

The photographs taken by the children are not merely examples of remarkable observation and talent; they reflect something much larger, morally encouraging, and even politically volatile: art as an immensely liberating and empowering force.

Devoid of sentimentality, Born into Brothels defies the typical tear-stained tourist snapshot of the global underbelly. Briski spends years with these kids and becomes part of their lives. Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than anthropological curiosities or primitive imagery, and a true testimony of the power of the indelible creative spirit.

See Sajit’s previous post.On this link off the Kids with Cameras website, you can “meet” some of the kids:

“I used to want to be a doctor. Then I wanted to be an artist. Now I want to be a photographer…”

Avijit, 12, is an innately talented artist and has won many competitions for his paintings. Charismatic and restlessly creative, his images were among the most compelling of the workshop. Avijit was invited by the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam to be part of their Children’s Jury in 2002. Avijit now lives at the Future Hope home for boys and attends one of the best schools in Calcutta.

Born into Brothels can be seen on the following dates and places:

I know from personal experience, as I am sure do many of our readers from their own experiences, what a gift a camera can be to a child who hasn’t used one. Perhaps the favorite picture I have ever snapped is this one which was taken by accident as I was handing the camera off to some students that I taught when I did volunteer work in Delhi a few years ago.