Street Kids Snap Their Way Out of the Shadows
Street Kids Snap Their Way Out of the Shadows
Wednesday, June 28, 2006. Issue 3441. Page 8.By Alastair Gee
Staff Writer
Fifteen teenagers took part in the project. Their pictures are sometimes unsettling, sometimes unremarkable.
A boy squats in a basement, his eyes wide and crazed. He is enveloped by concrete walls. Rusting pipes criss-cross the floor. A pack of cigarettes lies on a mattress blackened with mold and dirt.
No one knows the name of the boy, his age, where he comes from or what diseases may be flowing through his bloodstream. His anonymity is stark and, at moments, overbearing.
Seeking to help such street children overcome their invisibility, Belgian photographer Jorge Dirkx, working with Medecins Sans Frontieres, recently gave 15 of them disposable cameras and asked them to take pictures of their Moscow. The boy in the basement is just one of the many images to emerge from the month-long project.
The children behind the pictures are 13 to 18 years old. Most, if not all, of the shooters and their subjects come from homes in Moscow and the Moscow region, and earn up to 8,000 rubles ($300) a month stealing for gangs, unloading crates at markets or, in some cases, selling their bodies. Many are infected with tuberculosis or HIV. Come winter, pneumonia strikes.
Many of the pictures are remarkable for being unremarkable. Zhenya, 17, photographed two of his friends in a snow-covered backyard, their arms slung around each other, the ghost of a smile painted onto their faces. In another, someone has turned the camera on Zhenya himself. Donning a leather jacket, he strikes a defiant, James Dean pose, one denim-clad leg thrust forward.
Initially, the street children, being untethered to any particular place, appeared to take more pictures of their friends than their surroundings. But as the project progressed, the subjects, the images, the underlying thought processes shifted.
Artur snapped a street scene with a Stalin skyscraper in the background. Moscow appears almost impossibly beautiful. The sky is a lush blue; the turreted giant not far away looks like a fairy-tale palace. Zhenya captured a group of homeless people bathed in a bright, discombobulating sunlight at once cheery and incongruous, and then decided to take a picture of his shadow stretching across some steps.
Art of this kind is sometimes called Outsider Art — a genre designating works produced by people considered foreign to the world of art schools and galleries and so-called polite society: the homeless, psychiatric patients, the people who have been forced onto the margins. The children had only one workshop on the ABC’s of picture-taking. None of their images suggest great talent or even a basic grasp of the interplay between subject and object. They have a hard time, as might be expected from any adolescent photographer, manipulating light and color.
A melancholy rain scene outside a metro is blurry and skewed but with no apparent end in mind. Flash has been used liberally: A girl named Alyssa looms pale in the gloom of a darkened room, a brilliant circle of light in the mirror next to her reflecting the outline of the photographer.
"It was a surprise that people came to train us," Zhenya said at the opening of the exhibition earlier this month, talking quietly as he stared at the floor. "No one cares about us."
Moscow’s street children sleep in metro stations or underneath platforms in rail stations, which are heated in winter to keep snow from accumulating. The warmth also attracts stray dogs and rats. Last year, a boy was bundled into a car and raped by three men.
Street children’s heights are often stunted by malnutrition. If they have money, they spend it on hot dogs, Coca-Cola and glue, which they sniff.
MSF operates a day center and has teams of doctors and psychiatrists to monitor the children, whose numbers are unknown, but it has no control over what happens on the streets. Since the project wrapped up, in March, one of the children has contracted pneumonia. Another has disappeared.
