Professor documents torture survivors
By Ariane Wiltse
When John Kaplan returned from a Guinean refugee camp with portraits of torture survivors, he second-guessed his intentions.
“I did some real soul searching,” the photojournalism associate professor said. “Does this work have meaning, or is it just journalistic pornography?”
Over a two-week period in August 2001, Kaplan interviewed and photographed dozens of torture survivors of the diamond-financed civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. A Dean’s Seed Money Fund grant enabled him to travel to Guinea, and the Center for Victims of Torture helped coordinate his trip.
Motivated by what he deems the underreporting of worldwide torture in the media, Kaplan felt compelled to help “give a small voice to the voiceless.”
The Kaplan File
Current position: Associate professor.
He teaches photojournalism, international journalism and design
to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Pulitzer: Kaplan’s photo-essay about the diverse lifestyles
of 21-year-olds won the
feature photography prize in 1992. He also has twice been named a photography
juror for the Pulitzer Prizes.
Taking flight: Kaplan teaches the international journalism practicum Florida FlyIns. For 10 days each fall, budding photographers and writers travel to South America to produce a story.
Books: Mom and Me and Photo Portfolio Success.
Quote: “For any photographer, photojournalism is a process of growth. I have been fortunate to have been an award-winner during my career, but that doesn’t mean I’ve arrived as a photographer, or as a person.”
That voice resonates in his photo-essay “Transcending Torture.” In Kaplan’s stark, black-and-white portraits, 13 pairs of haunted eyes and one mangled hand capture the viewer with intimate ferocity. They evoke sympathy and horror, strength and compassion. The images include a man grotesquely disfigured after being tied and pushed into boiling water, a woman permanently scarred from eight months of daily rapes, and former child combatants.
The true rewards
In the past two years, “Transcending Torture” won some of journalism’s most prestigious awards, from such institutions as the Visa Pour L’image International Photojournalism Festival in Perpignan, France.
The Overseas Press Club of America awarded Kaplan’s work best in feature photography in 2002. The club’s executive director, Sonya Fry, called the portraits an “intense selection.”
Kaplan is the only professor to win in Fry’s 10 years of directing the club.
In April 2003, the human rights organization WHY (World Hunger Year) awarded Kaplan its Harry Chapin Media Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial bestowed its International Photojournalism prize for “outstanding reporting … of the disadvantaged.” RFK panelists described the work in a written statement as a “look at torture victims that doesn’t make you turn away.”
The project also received top honors from Pictures of the Year International, Photo District News and the National Headliner Awards. In June, the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. invited Kaplan to present his project as part of the club’s International Correspondents’ series, “Covering International Issues: What’s Our Responsibility?”
The St. Petersburg Times devoted more than three pages to Kaplan’s photos and article on March 17, 2002. Numerous magazines, books and an international photography journal also published the project.
Most important, Kaplan said, the recognition draws attention to torture. “If winning an award helps to raise an issue and let people know this shouldn’t be ignored, then that’s a positive forum. [The work] should never be for your gratification – to capitalize on someone else’s misfortune.”
That misfortune was delivered on a horrific scale in West Africa. More than a quarter of a million people died in Sierra Leone’s eight-year civil war, according to Amnesty International. Survivors bear the evidence of the horror.
“As many as 4,000 men, women and children suffered mutilations, crude amputations of their hands, arms, legs, lips or ears; others suffered lacerations and gunshot wounds,” Amnesty International reported in 1999. “Men who refused to rape members of their own families had their limbs amputated as punishment. Children were ripped from their mothers’ backs and killed with machetes.”
Liberia was worse, having endured two civil wars over a period nearly twice as long. Human Rights Watch reported “widespread rape, massacres inside churches, mutilation and torture, cannibalism and the forced conscription of [15,500] child combatants.”
Seeking reassurance
When Kaplan returned from West Africa with similar stories of horror, he knew his work was powerful, but questioned whether it was empathetic. He turned to Kim Phuc – the immortalized, nude girl in Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo of fleeing, napalm-burned children in Vietnam – for direction.
Phuc, a married mother in Toronto, leads a human rights organization bearing her name. When she viewed Kaplan’s portraits, she became consumed by childhood nightmares.
“When I see these pictures they break my heart,” she wrote to Kaplan. “I feel the pain and suffering and relate to them from my own experience .... I cry out to ask people to help each other as much as you can. Do something. Not talk, but action. People have to love and lead with love and compassion.”
Phuc’s words reassured Kaplan’s mission.
“The atrocities of the world will continue, [but] the more the work is shown the better chance change will come,” Kaplan said. “[Journalists have] a responsibility to tell these stories.”
Directly and indirectly, Kaplan has been telling the story of the torture survivors around the world. The United Nations recently used his photos and testimonies to help facilitate contact with victims during Sierra Leone’s postwar Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“Good photojournalism,” he said, “can and should affect social change.”
Kaplan’s work may be viewed at www.johnkaplan.com.
