Jim Lommasson, What We Carried: Our Story
A collaborative photographic storytelling project by Jim Lommasson and refugees, genocide, and Holocaust survivors.

September 2 to September 30

Exhibit at NewZone Gallery
Reception: September 2,  5:30pm

Artist Talk at Emerald Arts Center
Artist Talk on September 18 @ 2:00pm

NewZone Gallery
110 East 11th
Eugene, OR 97401
541-683-0759
Daily from noon to 6pm
Photographyatoregon@gmail.com
Free to the public

Emerald Arts Center
500 Main
Springfield, OR 97477

We often think about war and its aftermath, as though there were a clear demarcation between the two. My projects have been driven by a desire to illuminate the darkness and give voice to the voiceless. I asked participants to let me photograph those few items that they were able carry with them on their long and dangerous journey to America. I then asked the participants to write directly on the photograph about their object and why that particular item was so important that they chose it above everything else. Their stories speak to much more than the object. The participants’ additions give voice to the universal plight of all refugees. Ordinary objects become sacred objects. The luminous inner life of these ordinary things is a testament to the unspeakable anguish of a life left forever behind.
-Jim Lommasson, jim@lommassonpictures.com

Participants in Lommasson’s What We Carried projects are from Iraq, Syria, Armenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Rwanda, Sudan, Burundi, Congo, Central African Republic, Tanzania, Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Lommasson has partnered with The Illinois Holocaust Museum and The Immigrant Story.

Jim Lommasson is a freelance photographer and author living in Portland and is a recipient of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

http://www.lommassonpictures.com/what-we-carried2