Home|Life* New Delhi
HOME|LIFE*
What happens when kids who live on the fringes of society, whose lives are invisible to most of us, get their hands on a camera and suddenly expose us to their world?
While participating in a series of photography workshops, 121 kids in 11 cities around the globe (Budapest, Cairo, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, New York, Paramaribo, Paris and Rotterdam) set out to photograph their world, as they saw it. Through their eyes we experience their hopes, dreams, and fears. Through their images we gain deeper understanding of their reality.
Chosen from more than 15,000 photographs, the images collected here range from the shocking to the beautiful and are often both at once. Beyond their seeming simplicity, the Home|Life* photographs are complex artistic and social statements that challenge the viewer to question the world around us.
Home|life* New Delhi 2004-2005
The Indian film Salaam Bombay, in which street kids played a leading role, attracted international attention to the fate of the homeless. It was the inspiration for the organisers of the Salaam Baalak trust, which devotes itself to the well over 300.000 homeless children. Some have been left behind in a jam-packed station. Most of them are on the run from domestic violence , a drinking dad, a stepfather who beats them or the problems of poverty. ‘In that case leave!’ said the parents of little Sahil from Bihar, the poorest community in India. When he was seven, his parents decided it was time for him to start working, but he didnt feel like it. He ran away from home, lived in a trainstation for a year, came back on the right track with help from a mission school, and returned to his parents. They didn’t like that. “I was no longer welcome,” says Sahil, who ended up in New Delhi. As one of the 14 million people who are trying to find their way in the dusty bustling city. Sahil was lost and struggling.
Salaam Baalak Trust took care of Sahil and others like him, The kids go to school there and get the upbringing they have missed. The hope is that they will be reunited with their parents at a later stage. The Salaam shelter remains a home for those who can’t return.
The children’s memories are those of the slum-life. Sometimes no more than a dozen little houses located under an overpass and put together from plastic and garbage form a ‘neighbourhood.” Those who live near an important throughway can be unlucky. Recently a dignitary had to be picked up from the airport, and to give the international guest a good opinion of New Delhi, a small slum next to the road was levelled with bulldozers. At the same time the government wishes to do something about the problem but lacks money and resources. The children try to earn money themselves by polishing shoes and collecting bits of plastic and empty cans. Young girls, often og Nepalese descent, are traded by brothel keepers.
The nine children of the Salaam Baalak Trust who take part in the home|life* photo project prefer not to talk about the past. They sometimes take pictures of people sleeping on the streets, but they’d much rather take pictures of flowers. The beauty of India is what they want to show because of the ugliness they already know too well. The children often daydream. Sahil wants to become a photographer or dancer.
Archana plans on being a social worker to help children who struggle as she does. Krishna, who fled from Nepal by jumping on a train, became stuck in New Delhi. Later, he wants to join the army. Raju dreams of being an artist.
“Think of all the attention I’ll get!”
The exhibition
The photos were on show in light boxes outside of the Visual Arts Gallery in New Delhi, spread over the gardens of the Habitat Center and was one of the the first outdoor exhibitions in India.
During the exhibition photographer Amit Khullar and Panca Evenblij organised with collaboration of Salaam Baalak Trust
and Plan India an educational program for street and school children from Delhi started a photoclub, where children can develop and continue their photo work.
In 2002, Evenblij moved with her partner and two-month-old daughter to Delhi, India, leaving her spacious studios in Amsterdam behind. “In Delhi I had this little studio where I was working. I started having these nightmares with big canvases, that I had to carry them for the rest of my life,” recalled Evenblij. Realizing the scale of her prior works was largely dependent on the space available to her, Evenblij decided to alter course. She began photographing her new surroundings, and her exploration of this new medium culminated in Home|life, a 2004/5 exhibition of photos taken by 121 homeless children around the globe, organized together with photographer Amit Khullar and the Salaam Baalak Trust. The final photographs were carefully selected first by the Homelessworld organisation, then by Evenblij and Khullar, from more than 15,000 photographic submissions, and exhibited in light boxes outside the Visual Arts Gallery in New Delhi.