Bought and Sold

I have been working on human trafficking since 2005. As a photographer wanting to dramatize the hideous circumstances and complexities around this subject, I faced the moral and aesthetic dilemmas of how to make visually compelling images that avoid exposing to public humiliation or further danger the very people I want to help.

Photographs of sex and prostitution in particular arouse moral judgement and voyeuristic interest. So I abandoned photo-reportage and a documentary style, street shots, hidden cameras or evocative set-ups. In our image-saturated culture, these frequently have a titillating effect and allow viewers to feel superior to, and removed from, the subject.

This new series presents a different vision, inspired by the survivors themselves. These collaborative "re-imagings" are aimed at deconstructing and transforming the person's victimhood by exploding their particular experiences of betrayal, deception, fear, violence, trauma, escape, survival and strength/hope into the universal.

The tension created between the formal aesthetic qualities of these works -- their surface beauty -- and the horrors being depicted are intended to throw you the viewer off balance. Out of that discomfort I hope to encourage you to reconsider your own assumptions and attitudes towards commercial sex and coercion, exploitation and pwerlessness.

"Compassion is an unstable emotion," wrote Susan Sontag. "It needs to be translated into action, or it withers."