From: Guest
Added: 2010-06-06

Category: Documentary
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Video Description: Do we see their world? It’s an intriguing question and it echoes the thoughts of bright young people who took part in this photo project to hold up a lens to their lives so that we too, can see what they see and how they see it.

So how do they see their world ? From a distance, lives of young people in rural Bangladesh can seem normal, peaceful … until we zoom in – through their lenses – and take a look up close.

Beyond the beauty of nature, the simple pleasures of village life, the lime-green paddy fields, and beyond the giggling girls, there is another image that we turn away from. In that image there is a family where two wives live side-by-side but never speak; a man beating his wife with unspeakable violence; a girl married at too tender an age, forced out of school where she had taken so much pride and joy in learning and now in despair. Girls sexually assaulted; small boys smothered in the dust of a filthy workshop, when they should be at school, because some adult said it was time they earned a living.

These are of the images of unseen tragedy. Every now and then we catch a glimpse of this world in an odd article in a newspaper, but we will not know, we will not understand and we will not be able to bring about change if we do not open our eyes first and see their world.

UNICEF undertook this project because we believe that it will help open our eyes to the reality lived by those young people. Our project for the Empowerment of Adolescents, funded by the European Union and implemented under the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, has provided this platform.

As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, our first commitment is to give an avenue to young people so they can show us and tell us about their lives, about their hopes and fears. For UNICEF, an imperative provision of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the article 12 on child participation: ‘States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child.’.

In partnership with Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, UNICEF offered the opportunity to thirty young people living far from the big cities to express themselves in an original manner. Not through words but through images. Not through long speeches but through a language that needs no translation – the power of an image.

This exhibition is the result of this commitment. It is a simple invitation to open our eyes and indeed begin to see their world.

Carel de Rooy
UNICEF Representative

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