Artist’s eye is witness to pain

EYES downcast, a red scarf framing her face, a young teenage girl is luminous against a barren desert landscape.

Another girl, age 12, hides her face behind a boldly patterned pink-and-black veil, but for one expressive, liquid brown eye.

A tear trickles down a toddler’s chubby cheek. He is held by his hollow-eyed mother, his skin stained purple after a medicinal swabbing.

These are a few of the faces of “The Children of Darfur,” an exhibition of photographs taken in the desolation that is much of Sudan’s Darfur province today, after years of brutal ethnic and political conflict.

Shown at the United Nations in the fall, and opening Sunday at the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA, the exhibition is a series of panoramic shots measuring 4 by 8 feet and digital images that vary from 16 by 20 inches to 30 by 40 inches. Taken in several of the region’s teeming refugee camps over the summer, they are the work of photojournalist Ron Haviv, who traveled to the region with UNICEF.

New York-based Haviv, 40, one of the war photographer founders of the independent photo agency VII, has taken images from dangerous and troubled hotspots around the globe -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Latin America, the Balkans -- that have earned multiple awards as well as the attention of world leaders; for many, his iconic picture of a Serbian soldier kicking a dying Bosnian woman came to define that conflict.

Although his work is framed through an artist’s eye -- it can be seen in major galleries and museums as well as in educational texts, newsmagazines and newspapers -- Haviv’s primary impetus is to “immediately raise awareness of what’s happening.”

“To force the public -- and through the public to force the politicians -- to do something,” he says. If that fails, the photographs can serve as evidence, “so that people can never say, ‘We did not know this was happening.’ ”

In Darfur, the U.N. reports that nearly 200,000 have died and millions have been displaced due to violence since the conflict between Arab-dominated militias and African rebels began in 2003. Yet some of Haviv’s photographs of the region are surprisingly pastoral, with swaths of green growth and billowing clouds in a blue sky.

Others are stark: In a play of light and shadow, a bare foot nearly touches a large-caliber shell-casing half buried in the sand; a boy of 8 or 9, on a quest for water, heads into a land so barren that a hunt for firewood can take more than a day.

Each trip away from the overcrowded camps means the possibility of attack, death, injury or rape. Since it is the children who are usually sent for water and firewood, girls as young as 8 are raped with regularity.

The luminous teenager in the red scarf, whom Haviv photographed with two of her friends, was terrified every day, she told him. Yes, she had been raped; yes, she continued to walk miles each day to find wood, because, she said, it was her responsibility to help her family.

Her photograph, Haviv finds, elicits the most comment from viewers.

Her beauty, the rich colors of her skin and clothing against the desert sand, speak to Haviv’s ability to convey “a sense of humanity and dignity” in his news work, said Alison Morley, who is chairwoman of the photojournalism and documentary program at the School of the International Center of Photography in New York. Morley curated the exhibition at the United Nations.

An artist as well as a photojournalist, Haviv is “an observer of color and light and space and depth,” Morley said. “Those pictures from Darfur are so tender to me because by bringing all this color” to the monochromatic desert palette, “he brings dignity and life to it.”

Haviv, whose gentle-eyed, youthful face belies the scale of human suffering he has seen firsthand, is never a dispassionate observer. When that day comes, he says, it will be time to stop.

“The key is finding that balance where you’re not so overwhelmed that you can’t take the photograph and you just put the camera down and start crying. I’ve learned to be able to have an emotional connection with my subject, but not let it overwhelm me to the point where I can’t work. Otherwise there’s no purpose for me to be there.”

What does keep him going? The sense that he is witnessing history -- and standing witness -- and that his pictures can amplify voices of suffering that can go unheard or are long ignored by the world at large.

Over the last 15 years, Haviv has seen his work contribute to move individuals, politicians and others in power to take action in humanitarian and ethnic crises; photos he took in the Balkans -- which earned him a death threat -- were used by prosecutors at the U.N.’s war crimes tribunal.

“It’s never enough,” Haviv says, “but it does something, and that gives me hope to keep trying to effect change.”

He hopes that people won’t stay away from the exhibition because the subject is difficult.

“I don’t believe that one photograph can change the world, but I think that the work that I’m doing, that my colleagues are doing, can help.”

Prints of the photographs will be on sale at the exhibition, with part of the proceeds going to UNICEF’s aid programs in Darfur. Haviv will participate in a free panel discussion on Darfur at 5 p.m. Sunday at Hillel, and he will speak on “Freelancing in a World of Risk” Friday evening and Saturday afternoon at the Newport Beach Central Library.

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‘The Children of Darfur’

Where: Hillel at UCLA, 574 Hilgard Ave., L.A.

When: Opening reception, 4 p.m. Sunday; panel discussion, 5 p.m. Regular schedule: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.

Ends: April 30

Price: Free

Info: (310) 208-3081, Ext. 108, www.uclahillel.org

Also

What: “Freelancing in a World of Risk” lecture

Where: Newport Beach Central Library, 1000 Avocado Ave., Newport Beach

When: 6:30 p.m. Friday, 2 p.m. Saturday

Price: $25 and $40

Info: (866) 301-2411, www.nbplfoundation.org