Carol Guzy
As Eugene Smith once said,
“Let truth be the prejudice.” The photographer Carol
Guzy reminded, continuing, “A photograph
can be a powerful witness and an eloquent voice for those who have none.
Pictures inform, educate, enlighten, captivate, and spur governments into
action. They are historical documents and poignant reminders of our human
frailties. Sometimes they touch our very souls.”
Carol Guzy
Carol Guzy
grew up in a working class family in Bethlehem and studied in public schools.
Her father died when she was young remaining alone with her ill mother. Instead
of becoming a nurse as she was asked by
her family, she enrolled in the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, completing a
two-year photography course. Eventually, he professor Walter Michot introduced
her to photojournalism. The Miami Herald first
recognized her talent, hiring her in the journal. In the following years she
travelled to Africa, Louisiana, Kosovo, Germany, Albania, States , and many other places, witnessing the
suffering and grief of victims in many places around the world and at the same
time recalling the marvelous highlighted side that each of them has the right
to shine.[1]
However, the place that she found most attractive and inspiring for her work
was Haiti. In an interview she said, “It’s not me, it’s Haiti. I have been to a
lot of places. Haiti is the most intense—both positive and negative. The
Haitian spirit touches your soul. After the quake, the Haitians mourned, they
prayed, they cried, they picked themselves up and moved along. It’s unnerving.
“After eight years from her graduation in Fort Lauderdale, she moved to Washington
where she won her first Pulitzer in 1986 for news photography in Haiti.
However, she later won other two Pulitzer Prizes.
The
artist released many interview and wrote herself many essays that help to read
her pictures. However, the perception of her work is very immediate. In fact, through
the interviews of the artist, it emerges her intent with the camera and her
idea of photography, which confirms her intent of spontaneity ,not intended to
alter the pictures and facts represented. In fact, she stresses, the human side,
which, as she says, is “a privilege” for the photographer and the viewer to
“witness” and report to the world.
In
terms of photographic style, her pictures show that she gives lot of importance
to the “moment “rather than looking for the right aperture or shutter. This is,
in fact, again explained in more than one interview of the artist, when she talks of the value of the “light we
glimpse within every being” which is more important than the objective “right
light” to catch in the atmosphere. This attention to the soul, putting her not
behind the lens, yet as a human, within all the feelings and emotions, witnessing
with the lens of the camera the same moment that helpless people experienced
with their real eyes, is what makes her photographs unique. Also her profound
motivation to follow her artistic vacation of photography, overcoming the
necessity of her family to have her to have a concrete job compared to art,
strongly emerges through her images.
Carol’s
concern seems to be to bring out the issue of separation between reality and
media; sufferance and lack of empathy with the sufferance of people who cannot
leave their reality. Her images become a place of meditation, a place to
experience; a didactic-empathic-aesthetic guide toward the life most us think
is helpless. Furthermore, she seems to
bring out issues that concern human behavior that she finds “horrific”, in
order to pose a quest and stress how it is an individual responsibility to
change things.
This picture shows Memunatu Mansaray imitatating the Statue of Liberty,
America’s symbol of freedom, during a charity boat tour. She came to the United
States with a group of Sierra Leonean war amputees to receive prosthetic limbs
in 2000. They had endured rebel brutality, but their vitality and spirit
remained intact. [1]
This picture shows a swallow depth of field with the
young girl sharp depicted in the foreground. The use of black and white for
this photograph gives more importance to the feeling, since here color might
have had represented a distraction from the main and only focus of the
composition. As we can read in the caption, Guzy calls by name the little girl,
giving importance to one over many similar stories which have been forgotten
and that otherwise would not be considered. Furthermore, she shows respect toward
the sensibility of the Sierra Leonean war amputees, portraying the most
vulnerable victims, a young girl , imitating the Statue of Liberty at her
shoulder with the unawareness and innocence that only children have. In this
way she open the doors of hope even in a tragic story, being able to catch the essence
of a moment of joy. If fact, it is clear in this picture as well as in the
previous, that the photographer did not aimed
to sabotage nor ask for the staging or changing of the pose or setting of the
picture. Everything preserves the natural, untouched, vulnerable looking and Guzy’s
subjects confirm this; the most spontaneous being in the world, victims and
children.
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