TRACING PRESENT SCARS TO PAST TRAUMAS - WOMAN'S PHOTO LENS
And a memory can be a powerful thing. Tweaked, reinterpreted, repackaged — in a war-ravaged country, it’s a political tool, to be sold back to people seeking stability, seeking answers. Or, it could be a means to empowerment, a way to define one’s course and actions across a lifetime.
Elizabeth D. Herman in her series “A Woman’s War,” examines memory’s relationship to the present, but also gives a voice to those often pigeonholed in the story of war: women. Ms. Herman understood that the world was messier, that women had roles that went beyond either caregiver or victim.
“I went into this project knowing that women as victims of rape was one version of history that was talked about a lot,” said Ms. Herman, 23. “It was kind of the only version of women in the war that was put forth.”
Her project is primarily concerned with the Vietnam War and the Bangladesh war of independence, but it’s a “post-conflict project,” striving to trace the scars that exist today to the events that made them. She places the viewer face-to-face with women whose stories are what remain of events that have faded into the past. “It wasn’t just that the war started and ended when it did, and then they went home,” she said. “They had to reconcile the scars of the war and deal the trauma and how that has lingered in their lives.”