Drawing the War, Voices from Eastern Congo produced by Duckrabbit

Amazing images and stories. I love photography for the power it holds to describe is incalculable.

Drawing the War from duckrabbit on Vimeo.

(Courtesy of Stephen Alvarez's Blog)

Duckrabbit has produced a series of multimedia pieces on the Eastern Congo (website here). This particular piece is about children kidnaped by the Lords Resistance Army. As part of rehabilitation and counseling returned abductees are encouraged to draw their experiences. Eastern Congo is a hard place, suffering there is so common that it does not rate as news by the world media. The LRA in particular is a dark subject there is a reason that its leader is under indictment by the ICC.

-creative director of Duckrabbit,
"too often the photography world whirs around a sense of art and not people. Africa is the dark continent, but as I'm sure you know spend enough time there and your eyes adjust."

Well their eyes have adjusted well. They tell the story beyond the headlines -or lack of headlines- and bring back humanity. Theses are people suffering, people with names and stories.

Bahati's Story - Condition Critical from duckrabbit on Vimeo.

Commissioned by MSF Duckrabbit has put together fine pieces of advocacy and storytelling.

Keep Shooting.
-Braun

Help Portrait

Recently I had the great honor to be a part of a special project... Help Portrait. A crew of like minded and hearted UBER talented photographers got together and gave up their valuable time and amazing skills to shoot portraits of the south Dallas community centered around CornerStone Church....They let me tag along.

Help Portrait (Dallas) from jordan bellamy on Vimeo.

I left encouraged and moved after spending the day shooting a whole range of families and individuals. Some had never had their portrait taken....EVER. The Mom+Son+Aunt (shot below) hadn't had a family photo since Chris (the son) was 2 years old!

Their first family portrait! (below) So Why is this project so important? Well for one, History. These photo's will last generations. When a great great niece asks what Aunt Linda looked like, the family will have a photograph to show her. It's important for everybody to know that they are loved, beautiful, and worth remembering. Worth documenting their life.

This man helped start Cornerstone Church. The area is not in the best part of town. Pastor Chris told us stories about early days of drive by shootings and dead bodies found behind the building was a regular thing. This man shines love for his area. It was my great honor to take his portrait.

Here are the first video's of the founder of Help Portrait, Jeremy Cowart. Thank you Mr. Cowart for your heart.




Seeing great photographer like Chase Jarvis, Jeremy Cowart, and Austin Mann use their talents not just to pay the bills, but enrich other's lives out of the solid goodness of their hearts gives me a great hope for the future of photography. Keep Shooting.

Huge Thanks to everybody involved! Amazing job