Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA - This powerful collection of photography about the Rwandan Genocide was sent to us by award-winning contemporary artist Barry Salzman after the exhibition of this series was cancelled in South Africa due to social distancing. Barry was awarded the Photographer of the Year Award in the Deeper Perspective Category from the International Photography Awards in 2018 for his work on this project. The exhibit was supposed to open on April 7th 2020, which was the 26th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide.

From the submission by Barry Salzman:

"The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim" is a series of 100 posthumous portraits of victims of the 1984 genocide in Rwanda, as imagined through their recovered personal possessions, which I photographed at Kabuga Village, Rwanda in May and November 2018.  I photographed these items, worn by genocide victims on the last day of their lives, as they were taken from the ground at newly discovered mass graves, almost 25 years after the genocide.  The full series of 100 images was scheduled to be exhibited at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, opening on April 7, 2020, and running for the 100 day duration of the genocide commemoration. The exhibition was canceled due to COVID-19.

All, but the last image in the series, are individual pictures of what victims were wearing on the day they were murdered, with a text statement in the first person.  The purpose of the text is to reflect the experience I had while making the images -- the overwhelmingly emotional feeling that I was shooting portraits of people, and not still life pictures of objects.   As part of my ongoing commitment to trying to humanize the victims, since the exhibition was canceled, I have committed to taking it virtual by posting a portrait a day on Instagram @barrysalzman, along with a short text, for the full 100 day duration. The final image in the series will be revealed on Day 100 of the virtual exhibition. I hope you will support my efforts and follow along.

Each of these posthumous portraits forces us to imagine the life story of one dead person out of the one million victims of the genocide in Rwanda.  They humanize people who would otherwise be forever dehumanized.  We can never comprehend one million dead people.  We can, however, readily imagine the life of that little boy, carrying his doggy backpack and each of the other people represented in this series of portraits.  They were each clubbed to death, dismembered by machete-wielding perpetrators or otherwise murdered in an effort to eliminate the Tutsi people.  We can know them.  Each lived at the very center of their own life story until the day they were murdered.

While working at Kabuga Village in Rwanda, I thought a lot about the words of French philosopher and art historian, Georges Didi-Huberman, "Let us not invoke the unimaginable, but instead, force ourselves into that difficult place of imagining."

Thank you for imagining with me.”                                 

Please take a look at this portion of the collection, and follow Barry on Instagram to support his virtual exhibition of this important work.

For more information about the artist and to see more projects, visit his Official Website.

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