Marie Dorigny

WINNER OF THE KODAK YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHER’S AWARD 1998

It was in Rajasthan, in Jaipur, one April morning. The rickshaw driver who was taking me to meet up with the children of the Global March, which by then had gone across the whole country, turned to me, peered into my face and said: “I know you. I saw you yesterday taking pictures of the children marching”. He looked down the road for a moment, then turned back to me and gave me the shock of my life: “I want to thank you. Thank you for doing what you do. It’s thanks to people like you that our suffering children will be heard in your country. And then perhaps things will change”.

A moment such as this is rare and magical; it makes everything seem easy all of a sudden. You start thinking you were right, were fighting for the right issues. Doubts and fears vanish. You think those pictures you went out to shoot, more because your instinct told you to do so than as a result of careful consideration, were justified. That they have a right to exist, that they may one day serve some purpose.

That along with the thousands of other pictures brought back by so many other photographers, all those battered, humiliated, repudiated women, those children that have been bought, terrorized, broken, the ill, the lunatics, all those that have fallen by the wayside of sacrosanct globalization, those pariahs of the new global village, may get a chance to speak out. A chance to look at you straight in the face and remind you that they have the same needs, the same aspirations, the same dreams as you. As I. Sometimes I wish my pictures were not what they are, that they showed only beauty, life, happiness, superficiality.

I would like to stop thinking of myself as “Mother Teresa the Tear-jerker”, as some friends used to call me mockingly. After all, no one ever asked me to go out and save the world. But time and again, I have felt the need to get close to those that -virtually - no one cares about. Each and every time, I come back shattered, richer, grateful. I lose all my bearings. Because those who have nothing can give you so much. And all I can give them in exchange for those moments of their lives that they shared with me, is my photographs.

Marie Dorigny, July 1998

The exhibition includes four parts of Marie Dorigny’s project on social exclusion and exploitation: AIDS, child labour, domestic slavery and child abuse.