Posts / November 18, 2008

Disposable People – Documenting Contemporary Global Slavery

The Royal Festival Hall recently had a compelling photography exhibit called Disposable People, Documenting Contemporary Global Slavery. The photos in the exhibit were incredibly powerful exposing the injustice of slavery that is still occurring around the world.

Slavery may be illegal but it’s by no means defunct (even if its guises have changed). More than 27 million people are still trapped in one of the world’s oldest forms of oppression. Documenting Disposable People features newly commissioned photo essays by eight renowned Magnum photographers–Ian Berry, Stuart Franklin, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Paolo Pellegrin, Chris Steele-Perkins and Alex Webb–on diverse instances of contemporary global slavery. With texts on each of these projects and an essay by expert and author Kevin Bales, this compendium explores a range of examples, including child labor in Bangladesh, sex slavery from Ukraine to Western Europe and the sexual enslavement of South Korean women by Japanese troops during the Second World War. Documenting Disposable People shows how the unfortunate emergence of a new kind of slavery is inextricably linked to the “ascent” of a global economy. – Amazon

The exhibit will make the following stops on it’s tour across the United Kingdom:

Southbank Centre, London, 26 September – 9th November 2008
The Gallery, University of Plymouth, 10 January – 21 February 2009
University of Northumbria, Newcastle, 28 February – 9 April 2009
Tullie House Museum, Carlisle, 23 May – 5 July 2009
New Art Exchange, Nottingham, 1 August – 13 September 2009
Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, 7 November 2009 – 9 January 2010

A print version of the photos and essays is available through Corner House Books or Amazon.