After covering gang violence in Los Angeles for over a decade, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Davidson now wants to broaden her canvas of work and capture human trafficking in India and Nepal.
While this is her first visit to India, the noted Los Angeles Times photojournalist has already started capturing what she terms as a “heart wrenching” problem plaguing the country. Her plan is to simply capture the lives of girls aged up to 14 years.
“The idea is to highlight the lives of young girls reclaimed from sex traffickers. Showing how differently they are being brought up during rehabilitation. In fact, many of them are left to be on their own,” Ms. Davidson told The Hindu .
So far, she has visited Bihar’s Mithila region, of which her photographs speak volumes of the vulnerability of young girls of being taken back into the sex racket by pimps.
Speaking of her work, “The Gang Violence: Shattered Families and Broken Society”, which fetched her the Pulitzer Prize in 2011, Ms. Davidson recalled the struggle she faced in convincing the Editors to run the photo series.
“When I first went to my Editors with my work on the victims and gangsters, they said ‘What’s new? Gang violence keeps happening’. I was taken aback and said that’s precisely why we should do it, because it happens so often. I still went ahead to do the project on my own,” she said.
In Los Angeles alone, the police have a record of as many as 40,000 gangs, she added. Her work on gangs is a series of photographs done on the incidents of random shootouts between gangsters in Los Angeles.
Rather than focusing on gangsters fighting against each other, Ms. Davidson preferred to follow the aftermath stories; how conflicts changed the course of the life of people, mostly victims, forever.
But, the one noticeable aspect of all her photographs is the predominant “black” victims and neighbourhoods.
When asked why her photographs captured mostly people of black origin, she said: “Eighteen-year old ‘black’ boys are getting killed much more than anybody else in the U.S. because they are all killing each other and the gun culture is to be blamed for this. The ‘whites’ somehow never get caught in cross fire.”
Ms. Davidson further expressed her angst over the extent to which Los Angeles is “ghettoised.” “Unfortunately, both the victims and perpetrators of gang violence are black in origin as they are marginalised, which brings us to the larger issue of racism in the U.S.,” she concluded with a sigh.
