Showing that love can help heal a child after experiencing tragedy, the Love after Loss exhibit at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy portrays Ethiopian children finding new families after being orphaned by HIV/AIDS.
Artist Elena Rue, a member of the Louis Hine Documentary Fellows Program who studied at the Center for Documentary Studies in 2001, spent nine months in Ethiopia in 2006 through the program.
The Hine Fellows program operates out of the Center for Documentary Studies and allows students with an interest in documentary studies to come to Durham for a year and take courses or travel for work. Rue, a 2001 graduate of Kenyon College, chose the latter in order to explore adoption in Ethiopia.
"My older brother was adopted from Thailand, so I'm very interested in adoption and photographing adoptive families," Rue said.
In Ethiopia, Rue worked with the Hope for Children program, which was created in 2001 to provide children affected by HIV/AIDS a new and loving home. The organization "supports kids whose families have been affected but aren't able to stay where they were," she said.
To capture the process and the livelihood of the adoption program, Rue became fluent in the local language and immersed herself in the culture to gain a more personal perspective.
Now lining the walls of the Sanford Building, each photo is a window into a reality half a world away. There is sadness in the photos, but as the title suggests, there is a greater presence of love and relief. One example is a photo of a young child reuniting with his blind grandmother after his parents died of AIDS. As she traces the lines of his face, the contact provides mutual happiness and comfort that is readily apparent.
A reason for the exhibit's location in Sanford is the Institute's partnership with the Louis Hine Fellows program.
"There has been a history [at Sanford] of looking at policy from a number of different perspectives and understanding [that] writing, photography, audio and film are other ways of engaging the world," said Alex Harris, professor of the ractice of public policy and founder and creative director of the Hine Fellows Program.
The CDS was actually conceived through an old series at Sanford focusing on documentary photography. Exhibits such as Rue's help keep that tradition alive.
"While the work of policy makers affect people on a macro scale, documentary photography brings out the personal side, showing how public policies affect individuals, families and communities," wrote Director of Communications for the Institute Karen Kemp in an e-mail.
As far as reaching an audience with the power to change the present, Sanford Institute is an ideal place since the students exposed to these photographs may be the ones influencing those very children through their work in public policy.
"Documentary work is so amazing because it makes you think about the actual people instead of statistics," Rue said. "I think it's neat for people working at the Sanford Institute and the students there to be reminded of the individuals who are affected by global issues."
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