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dima gavrysh – insha’allah

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ESSAY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT

EPF 2010 Finalist

Dima Gavrysh

Insha’Allah

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I took a photograph of Captain Harris, the commander of Combat Outpost Tangi, in Afghanistan’s Wardak province, as he was waiting for a helicopter to take him to the funeral of one of his soldiers. While he was covered by a cloud of dust, he seemed lost and overcome by his surroundings  the photo turned out to be truthfully despondent. His people are hated by the locals. He hates to lose his people to IEDs. I bet he hates the role he is assigned to play in winning hearts and minds of the locals, and he probably doesn’t believe in it even if he tries.

The photographs I shot through a night vision device had a quality reminiscent of early silver gelatin process and modern video games at the same time. In the first picture of my portfolio, the soldiers portrait acquired a GI-Joe-like quality, with the humanity taken out of his appearance. He looks like a war robot, a part of greater military machinery, and not as an individual human being. There is uneasiness and despair mixed with confusion. No one knows the right way to fight this war and when it is going to end, if ever. All of it looks like some huge experiment, where a civilization is being pushed forward through warfare. It doesn’t seem to work and yet we try.


Bio

Dima Gavrysh is a Ukrainian-born, New York City-based photojournalist. He started his career in the mid-90’s in Kiev, Ukraine. For the past 10 years, he has worked with major news agencies such as Associated Press, Agence France Press, European Press-Photo Agency, Gamma-Press, Reuters, and Bloomberg News.

Dima’s work has been published in magazines and newspapers worldwide including The New York Times, Time, People, Paris Match, Independent, Marie Claire, Stern and Newsweek.

Awards:
AI+AP (American Photography + American Illustration): published in 2008- 2010 yearbook.
2010 PDN Photo Annual Contest: Photojournalism.
International Photography Awards ? Lucie: honorable mention: 2008-2009.
XVIII Eddie Adams Workshop participant: winner of an internship for the Washington Post.com: 2005


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Dima Gavrysh


dima gavrysh – uganda’s forgotten war

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Dima Gavrysh – Uganda’s Forgotten War

For over two decades a sectarian rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its infamous leader, Joseph Kony, have been waging a war against the Ugandan people and government, burning villages, mutilating civilians, and abducting children. Based in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the LRA has continued to terrorize northern Uganda since the late 1980’s, forcing millions of people to abandon their homes for dire conditions of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps.

The ongoing warfare became one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts and one of the most underreported crises in the world. The LRA has been known for particularly brutal mutilation of the civilians, and an uncounted number of people who survived an encounter with the LRA guerrillas had their limbs, ears, and noses cut off. Terrified by the prospect of being killed, abducted, or tortured, most villagers in northern Uganda prefer the squalid conditions of the IDP camps, and by the present time an entire generation has been born and raised in IDP camps and has never seen their own village. People in the affected area have been helped by Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), who provide health care, rehabilitate and run hospitals, battle epidemics, carry out vaccination campaigns, and offer mental healthcare, easing the existence for the refugees.

Children have suffered disproportionately in this conflict, and they are one of the most striking symbols of the violence in the region. Over 20,000 children have been abducted by the LRA during the conflict, for use as soldiers, porters, and sex slaves. An unknown number has been killed. As a result, every night tens of thousands of children stream into towns and centers of larger IDP camps to seek shelter for the night. Various humanitarian organizations set up shelters, such as the Noah’s Ark shelter in the town of Gulu, that provide a safe place for the so called “night commuters” to spend the night. As the darkness falls, slender shapes wrapped in blankets fill the floor of plastic tents that serve as communal bedrooms. Before the sun rises in the morning, children gather their belongings and return home, surviving another night.

A fragile truce was established between the Ugandan government and the LRA in 2006, and the 1.6 million people from approximately 200 camps began drifting toward home. The reports of various human rights violations, including killings, mutilations, abductions, and sexual violence are still not uncommon; however, as peace talks progressed in 2007 and LRA fighters left northern Uganda, people continued to return to their villages or smaller camps.

Photographs: Dima Gavrysh
Website: www.dimagavrysh.com