The sun came out just in time for the opening last night. The sky had been black, and rain had been coming down in buckets just beforehand. It was a wonderful opening. Thanks to all of you from Kansas City who attended and who made it such a great event. Bird Fleming, drummer extraordinaire, and the kids from Operation Breakthrough stole the show, but the faces in the photographs from St. Mary Kevin Orphanage Motherhood were definitely a close second. Thank you to Lee, Cheyenne, Maria and Jennifer for selling the t-shirts, CDs and jewelry. And thanks to Paul for donating a portion of the print sales to Change the Truth.
We woke up to this article in the morning paper.
EXHIBIT
Bringing home a tragedy
Kansas City photographer is seeking aid for her subjects in Uganda.
By JAMES A. FUSSELL
The Kansas City Star
“Muzungu. Photo me! Photo me!”
Children pranced around Gloria Baker Feinstein, eyes filled with wonder at the device the Kansas City photographer held in her hand. It was only a digital camera, but to the knot of Ugandan orphans, it might as well have been a magic wand.
They had never seen themselves before. Not in a photo, not even in a mirror. For that matter most had never seen a muzungu, the Swahili word for white person.
When they met Feinstein some stared, while others wanted to touch her skin. One began to scream. But soon they were running around taking pictures of each other with the pile of disposable cameras she gave them.
Feinstein, 52, went on her “photographic mission” to Uganda late last year out of “a need to do something helpful by photographing something important.” A one-woman exhibit of black-and-white images from her trip opened Friday at the Leopold Gallery in Brookside.
She went with Maine Photographic Workshops, a photo and film school in Rockport that offers advanced training to serious photographers. Much of her time was spent at rural orphanages. She also spent four days with a family who lived in a mud hut in a remote village, with no electricity or running water. The conditions were poor, the needs overwhelming. Somehow, it didn’t define them.
“In Uganda,” she wrote on her Web site (gloriabakerfeinstein.com) “there is something sorrowful and achingly sad in the air, in the eyes of the orphaned children, in the dirty water they drink, in the torn clothing they wear, in the doomed futures many of them face.
“There is also something completely beautiful and uplifting in the air, in the way the sun rises and gently lays back down, in the elegant and graceful stance of the women, in the impromptu games of the children, in the throbbing of the drums, in the gladness of a tender greeting from a perfect stranger.
“Most of the people I met have nothing. And yet their hearts are so full; they’re so kind and warm.”
She stayed in Uganda for three weeks, photographing three orphanages, recording stark images of the children.
“There are so many children,” she said. “There is a kind of a middle generation that’s just been erased. In all, 2.2 million orphans in Uganda have lost either one or both parents to AIDS or the war. And so there are all these children who have to find their way. They’re sometimes taken in by a grandmother. Others end up on the street. I just wanted to tell their stories through pictures.”
You can find some of Feinstein’s Uganda pictures on her Web site. One of her favorites is of a boy standing by a chalkboard with a powerful gaze.
“He sums up what I saw in the eyes of most children there, which was part resignation and part hope,” Feinstein said. “Those eyes. They just won’t let go of you.”
When it was time to go home, she couldn’t just walk away. There had to be something she could do to help. She started a foundation called Change the Truth to benefit a Ugandan orphanage. In the months she has been home she has raised enough money to send six kids to school and buy equipment to help them start a brick-making business. She plans to keep helping them and even to return this summer with her husband.
Since she was a toddler, Feinstein has used cameras to make sense of her world. One of her earliest memories is as a 3-year-old propping up her toy bunny against a cardboard box and taking a picture with her Brownie camera. She built a darkroom in her house as a teenager and grew up to become a professional photographer. She sold fine-art photos at her own gallery until 1992, when she opened a portrait business.
Then something happened that energized her passion for documentary photography. She took on a project for the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education that resulted in a book with fellow photographer David Sosland called From the Heart.
The book, published in 2001 by Kansas City Star Books, featured portraits of, and interviews with, 50 Holocaust survivors from the Kansas City area. Shortly thereafter she went to Europe to photograph eight concentration camps.
That led to another book, Among the Ashes, published in 2004. She knew then that she could use her camera to educate, enlighten and make a difference. Now, after her experience in Africa, she doesn’t know if she’ll ever go back to portrait work.
“You get requests from people to make their teeth whiter, to make their arms look thinner or to get rid of their double chin,” she said. “That seems pretty insignificant compared to taking pictures of kids who didn’t know where their next meal was coming from or where they were going to put their heads down that night. It just put things in perspective for me.”
Feinstein is now dedicated to raising awareness — and money — to help send more orphans to school.
“These children know the only way they are going to get out of the rut they are in is by education. These kids don’t want new sneakers; they don’t want a new Ipod. They just want a school uniform, books and a classroom.”
THE DETAILS
•Pictures from Gloria Baker Feinstein’s photographic mission to Uganda can be seen at an exhibit at the Leopold Gallery, 324 W. 63rd St. in Brookside. The exhibit runs through May 24.
•For more information, or to make a donation, you can log on to Feinstein’s blog, gloriainafrica.blogspot.com.
Twenty percent of sales will be donated to Change the Truth, which supports children at St. Mary Kevin Orphanage Motherhood, an AIDS orphanage in Kajjansi, Uganda.
•The Leopold Gallery is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Feinstein’s Uganda pictures also can be seen on her Web site: gloriabakerfeinstein.com.
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