>>REVIEW
THE SAN
Robert Semeniuk
Runs until October 22
PhotoSpace Gallery
Diseased, displaced but not crushed by despair, the San people are the subject of documentary photographer Robert Semeniuk’s current exhibition at PhotoSpace Gallery, The San – AIDS and Dislocation.
"The essence of documentary photography is in making the ordinary become extraordinary, and honouring the subjects," writes Semeniuk in his artist’s statement. "Good photographs move us because they represent moments of looking more deeply at the subject than we had previously experienced."
Born in Big Valley, Alberta, the award-winning documentarian has spent a three-decade-long career travelling the world in search of images that "move us." Rather than focusing his camera on the most obvious elements of an ongoing story, Semeniuk crawls inside the places he photographs in order to transcend picture-taking and elevate it to a form of visual empathy.
The San, also known as the Basarwa people, lived in the Kalahari Desert for tens of thousands of years before being pushed off their traditional lands by a government seeking to increase agriculture production and diamond mining in the area. It’s a familiar but still heartbreaking story that has played out at various times all over the world, including Canada – one in which indigenous people are marginalized to make way for agricultural and industrial growth. Forced to the edges of the places they once were stewards over, the San now live a precarious existence at best.
It’s a situation that could also be exploited for photographic purposes, but instead Semeniuk’s work thankfully does just what he says it will do – "honour the people." Instead of intruding on the San, he captures a still-functioning society held together by a bond forged out of sheer determination and will power.
Images such as D’ Kar Child, a photograph of a four-year-old girl who was born with AIDS, highlight the vast abilities of this sensitive photographer. Rather than another image of an emaciated African child staring out in despair, the viewer sees an innocent figure that looks out from the photograph with eyes that still do not understand how the world has failed her.
Far from being romanticized interpretations, these black and white photographs put a human face on the San’s plight. A human and environmental rights activist as well as a photographer, Semeniuk urges all of us to abandon our complacency and get involved in setting things right in places he has witnessed first-hand. "Dislocation and dispossession cause disease and are strong co-factors in the spread of AIDS," he writes on his website, www.robertsemeniuk.com. "People without homes get sicker than people with homes and when people get sick they want to go home…. The San are the poorest of the poor in Botswana, which has the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the world, with up to 40 per cent of adults infected. The Botswana government is systematically displacing The San from their ancestral homelands in the Kalahari Desert to ‘resettlements’ that some San call ‘Places of Death.’" |
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