Humanitarian
photographer Lisa Kristine of Mill Valley had captured the
dignity of indigenous people in 100 countries on six continents, yet never
realized that modern-day slavery was in the shadows everywhere
she traveled.
That all
changed when Kristine, whose color-saturated photos are set to go on world tour
this year, met an abolitionist while exhibiting her work at the 2009 Vancouver
Peace Summit. The advocate told Kristine that 27 million people are enslaved
worldwide - more than twice the estimated number of people taken from Africa
during the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries.
"I almost
fell over," said Kristine, whose images hang in the Palace of Bhutan, have
been auctioned at Christie's to benefit the United Nations, and have drawn
accolades from the Dalai Lama. "It blew me away that I, whose
whole job is to see, didn't know."
Within a
week, she was in the Los Angeles offices of the advocacy group Free the Slaves,
offering to use her 19th century, 4-by-5 camera to expose slavery: the
impoverished children and adults given false promises of money, education
and a better life, only to be tricked into indentured labor and held in
captivity by fear, force and coercion.
Illegal mine
In Ghana,
Kristine climbed 200 feet down an illegal gold-mine shaft to find men with
crude flashlights tied to their heads, forced to endure dust and dark for
72-hour stretches.
Escorted by
local representatives from Free the Slaves, she found children in the Himalayas
lugging slabs of slate heavier than themselves down the mountains, via crude
harnesses attached to their foreheads made from sticks, rope and
torn cloth.
At a brick
kiln in Nepal, she photographed workers in 130-degree heat and choking dust,
stacking 18 bricks on their head at a time and walking the loads to
waiting trucks.
"All I
could see was Dante's 'Inferno,' " Kristine said.
She saw
trafficked children in tattered shirts reeling in 1,000-pound fishing nets on the
shore of Lake Volta in Ghana, freezing in the early dawn after all-night
fishing expeditions.
Avoiding
patrolmen with automatic weapons, she quickly snapped off a few shots with her
35mm camera of men, women and children panning for gold in huge, watery pits
contaminated by mercury in Ghana.
'No end in sight'
"These
slaves are in plain sight, some are hidden deep in the jungles - some of them
don't even understand they are enslaved because they have been laboring all
their lives - with no pay, and with no end in sight," Kristine said.
The images
she brought back stunned the world, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who wrote in the preface to her
2010 book, "Slavery"(...)
