WUNRN
ONE PERSON CRYING: WOMEN & WAR -
GLOBAL PHOTO ESSAY - MARISSA ROTH
A MOTHER'S GRIEF
Sara
Duvall,
whose son, Aaron Reed, was a Marine killed in Iraq
One Person Crying: Women and War, is
a 28-year, personal global photo essay that addresses the immediate and lingering
effects of war on women. In an endeavor to reflect on war from what I consider
to be an underreported perspective, the project brought me face to face with
hundreds of women who endured and survived war and its ancillary experiences of
loss, pain and unimaginable hardship. I traveled the world photographing,
interviewing and writing down their histories, noting gestures and gruesome
details, in order to document how war irrevocably changed their lives. Women
are the touchstones for families and communities and are often relied upon to
keep everything held together during a war or conflict. Often, there is no time
for them to assess their own traumas afterwards, let alone speak of them in
order to process the experience. I was compelled to put faces and give voices
to the other side of war, with no judgment as to which war was worse for its
victims. There is no blood or any guns in the images, just the record of lives
lived with a never-ending post-war backdrop.
The consequences of war for women in countries, cultures and
communities that are directly affected by it, have often been overlooked. My
main hope for this project is to show that war doesn’t discriminate how it
metes out pain or suffering, that women are basically the same everywhere in how
they endure war and live with its aftermath into their post-war lives. I also
hope that this project inspires dialog and activism, in order to bring
on-the-ground psychological and social support to these war-impacted women.
Addressing this subject started in response to immediate
political and social events that I covered as a photojournalist starting in the
late 1980’s. After 10 years, I formalized it into a documentary project and
continued it from that perspective. In 2009, it was during a trip to Bosnia and
Herzegovina and Serbia, that I fully understood the deeper motivation for this
work. My parents were Holocaust refugees and my paternal grandparents and
great-grandmother, were killed in a 1942 massacre in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. On
the final day of that trip, I found my grandparents’ former home, and also
found their names on a memorial plaque by the Danube River, dedicated to the
numerous massacre victims. It felt like I had found them for the first time.
In March/April of 2012, I went to Vietnam for the first time, in
order to finally conclude the arc of the project. The war in Vietnam was my
coming-of-age war and greatly influenced my formative years, not only as a
person and activist, but also as a photographer.
Marissa Roth - Los Angeles