She is an indigenous woman from the Juruna People, and he is a riveraine, a fisherman. They live by the riverside of the Xingu Basin, in the Brazilian Amazon – in the same place where she and her grandmother were born, and many others before them.

He used to fish in another river of the Amazon, but got displaced by the construction of the Tucuruí dam, which made his living and fishing impossible in that area. He moved to the neighboring area of Altamira, Pará, where he had some distant relatives. And one day, visiting her community, they met and fell in love. He moved into her community, where he has been living for almost 17 years.

Now, they fear that an event of the same sort of the one that brought them together will happen again. A dam is being built on the Xingu River. Their community location is the closest one to the dam and is directly affected by the project. His (and others) ways of life will, again, be made impossible.

Some members of the community are planning to move into the city, others are too old and refuse to leave the place that means the whole world to them. A mix of love and despair resonate straight out of this intimate moment captured in the picture. Love for each other, for their territory, for their family and community members, and despair caused by the uncertainty of the future, the broken family bounds, and the end of life as they know it.

The fisherman’s experience says that this moment is a turning point in their lives, but he fears it is not love what they will find around the corner – because they had already found it right there. As the first community members start to leave, the community is fragmented with the interference of this external seemingly unavoidable force.

Social research in the realms of Development and Human Rights studies all around the world have been struggling to put the social impacts of development projects into the research agenda and to influence public policy concerns.

Development is indeed a social construct that transforms lives.

“[D]evelopment is the major influence on 300 million indigenous peoples around the world, almost always to their detriment. […] sometimes governments, and other cultures, still consider that indigenous people are an obstacle to development – or are simply in the way of mineral exploitation or someone else’s property development” [Swepston 2005].

In the case of internal displacement, indemnities are paid to the impacted people. Yet, the broken social links, not to speak of the end of cultural practices that are strictly related to a specific territory and the dynamics and ways of life made possible in those places are still of little practical concern.
Constructivists [Berger and Luckmann 1966] say that collective knowledge is more than merely shared ideas, but are entrusted with a structural character.
It is “embedded in social routines and practices as they are reproduced by interpreters who participate in their production and workings. Intersubjective meanings have structural attributes that do not merely constrain or empower actors. They also define their social reality." [Wendt, 1999]

Given that the constellation of relations that once allowed for the continuous constitution of that given community was shaken on its very basis, their social reality runs the risk of ceasing to exist.

Indeed, the last thing I’ve heard before leaving the place was that they had little news of community members that settled for indemnity and left place, as if they had “vanished into this large world”. And that can be the end of the world as they knew it.

Religion claims to be a separate social realm distanced from state and politics. In Ukraine, as well as in the so-called Western countries, this maxim is enshrined at the legislative level: Ukraine is proclaimed a secular state with an autonomous religious field that deals with transcendental. This photo simultaneously shows that division of state and religion mainly remains hypocritical, at the same time deconstructing their actual synthesis.

In the de-jure secular, yet atheistic de-facto USSR Lenin’s phrase “Religion is the opium of the people”, which is actually a direct quotation from Karl Marx, was very popular. This phrase comes from the 19th century when opium along with other anesthetics became widely used as a reaction to social and cultural shifts described by Georg Simmel, Zigmunt Freud, and Walter Benjamin. In 1859 cocaine was synthesized from the same coca plant that was used to produce "Coca Cola", the famous health beverage, which spawned one of the most prominent success stories of American capitalism. These allusions mix religion, market, and "Coke" in a psychedelic cocktail that gives birth to several observations.

The most obvious thing about this photo is that it clearly demonstrates the process of commercialization of religion. If the church unites with the state in a pseudo-secular state, this usually becomes possible through the totality of market, which absorbs and envelops all social phenomena. Less obvious is the opposite interpretation of the picture as the evidence of ritualization of late capitalist practices, which are turned into some kind of religion (as, for instance, shopping interpreted by Zygmunt Bauman as a rite of exorcism). Either religion becomes sold or trade becomes a religion, this situation is intolerable for a state that positions itself as secular and should be changed. So, the seemingly natural synthesis of state and religion is undermined in the picture by two visual oppositions that indicate the absurd character of the abovementioned union.

First opposition is created by the frontal disposition of the camera. Together with the depiction of a geometrically perfect pattern of the paving tile it refers to Renaissance perspective and classical ways to make it visual. At the same time the photo represents icons, traditionally performed within the system of reverse perspective. According to the rules of linear perspective the point of view of the viewer in front of the picture coincides with the point of view of God, while the reverse perspective moves God’s point of view onto the picture. The contrast between 2 perspective systems questions the legitimate status of Ukraine as a de-facto nonsecular state.

The second opposition is connected with the notion of aura. According to Walter Benjamin, the aura of an artwork vaporizes when its unique (cult, religious, transcendent) manifestations give way to mass reproduction. Then, the most auratic form of visual art would be the icon (cult, religious, and transcendent par excellence), while the least auratic artform would be photography, especially that which avoids depicting people. On the photo in question the mode of representation (reproduced and deprived of any individuality) is contrasted to what is depicted on the picture, that is the icons (transcendent, unique, auratic), creating a visual gap,which becomes a fruitful soil for the social commentary to the problem of the yet inaccessible secular state.

Such aesthetic maneuvers also alter the residents’ perception of their own living situation. While many informal residents would be considered in a state of dire poverty according to strictly quantitative analysis, subjective and visual research allows a better understanding of the forces that contribute to empowerment and well-being. Aesthetic adaptation is such a force. Considering that many governments today actively engage in slum relocation projects moving individuals to pre-built and often unalterable concrete housing, it is crucial to consider what happens to the individual’s freedom to make his or her own aesthetic decisions.

In his work on the "freedom to build" in Latin American informal settlements, John Turner famously argued that the important thing about housing is ‘not what it is, but what it does in people’s lives’ (Turner 1976). Resonant of Heidegger’s existentialist notion of being in ‘Dwelling, Building, Thinking,’ Leonardo, the man photographed here - a single father with a teenage son, living in an informal settlement in Guanacaste, Costa Rica - eloquently stated in my interview with him that building a home is equal to ‘being a man’. Interestingly, he claimed that he would never paint any part of his home even if given free paint of his favorite color, because it wasn’t worth it due to the possibility that the home could be taken away at any point due its illegal status. Yet he has lived here for twenty years, and it is visually evident that he had chosen various pieces of reclaimed wood to construct his home, all of various colors, obviously composing them so as to group similar colors together. This resulted in a colorful and rather beautiful facade, with delicate fabric in the window and doors aligned so as to emphasize the pastoral setting. This greatly contests the universally homogenized conception of what a “slum” looks like.

The aestheticization of poverty begins with language but can be powerfully contested with photography. Although many terms exist locally to refer to informal settlements, from "bustee" in Bangladesh to "kijiji" in Kenya or "tugurio" in Costa Rica (Sylvia Chant 2009), the international adoption and accreditation of the term ‘slum,’ not least by the United Nations, has universalized informal settlements into a largely unidimensional connotation. Even the State of the World’s Cities Report of 2008-9 refers to the term 83 times before ever defining it on page 92.

This is why household level qualitative research is invaluable. The contradiction between Leonardo's words and his actions - illuminated through this photograph - leads to a crucial understanding about the value of aesthetic adaptation in his life, albeit limited by his house’s status of illegality. The people I interviewed and photographed in twenty-two other households in Guanacaste led me to discover equally personal and empowering demarcations of space, sometimes limited by gender relations within the home and sometimes by government. Legal or not, the aesthetics of a home provide a form of agency that every individual has a right to.

Implemented in 1979, the one-child policy was aimed at curbing population growth, which was seen as a hindrance to the nation’s economic progress . The family unit was thus seen as a functional vehicle for fulfilling the state’s goals, and had little say in the state’s top-down policies.

Given Chinese patriarchal values, it was refreshing to capture an intimate moment between father and child. Traditional, patrilineal Chinese society dictated that males exert their dominance over their families . Men were bred-winners and public figures, while women took care of children and the elders. Patriarchs were unlikely to show affection towards their children, much less be involved in caring for their children.

Nevertheless, since the implementation of the one-child policy, there has been more involvement of both parents in the care of their children, particularly that of fathers. With the restrictions on family size, parents are likely to have more energy and resources to direct towards their children. The inability to have many children also means that both parents are more likely to value their offspring more, and desire to provide them with immaculate care. Hence, indirectly, the state has helped to re-shape traditional gender roles and allow for a more egalitarian split of child-care responsibilities.

In spite of widespread criticisms, the one-child policy has allowed single children in urban China to enjoy higher levels of education, and better employment opportunities, indirectly leading to the acceptance and empowerment of daughters in urban families. Having attached all their love, hope and eventual need for support in old age onto their single children, Chinese parents would go to great lengths to allow their sons and daughters alike to be satisfied and successful. Daughters, who would have been victims of gender bias, now have more resources and support when seeking education and employment opportunities . With better jobs and thus higher socio-economic status, these women are therefore able to garner greater acceptance from their parents and society. Ironically, a draconian and aggressive birth control policy has allowed for greater gender equality.

Children are undeniably the apples of their parents’ eyes. Yet, the Chinese regime, not parents, retains significant influence over its young citizens’ lives through its top-down policies. The young infant in the photo is a prized product of China’s one-child policy, and will someday grow up to become an agent who would indirectly (or even involuntarily) enforce the policy. "Little emperors" are born out of the state’s intervention in the nation’s bedrooms, in the interest of the greater good, for as a Party slogan goes, "It is good to just have one child.".

In view of the state's dominance, what say do parents have in their children’s upbringing? Are they merely powerless agents? State-directed construction of the family unit, and by extension, the identity of the individual, may be a key factor in shaping social and gender norms, but with growing grassroots action in contemporary Chinese society, the family unit and gender roles look set for changes ahead. Perhaps, in the near future, such a portrait of parent-child relations may be completely foreign to China’s urbanites as they create or embrace new social norms.

This photograph also conjures a sense of strong division between the U.S. and Mexico with the imposing presence of both the fence and border patrol. These elements suggest another view of the border held by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS): one that enforces strong divisions between “us” and “them,” where the insiders are Americans and the outsiders are Mexican nationals. Many in Brownsville, however, consider themselves part of a bi-national community spanning both sides of the border and oppose the divisive presence of both the fence and border patrol in their community. This image offers a glimpse into the conflicting views of the border held by the DHS and the border communities living in the midst of post-9/11 border security.

While living in on the Texas-Mexico border conducting dissertation research national security was a backdrop of daily life. Border patrol SUVs regularly cruised city streets, scared young immigrants who just swam the Rio Grande River occasionally ran through a park near my house, and the border fence is visible from the streets of neighborhoods. While scholarship on national security details its many macro level political implications[1], this image reminds us that for those living in Brownsville national security is not just an innocuous backdrop. The policies promoted by the DHS are impediments to cross-border flows of culture, family, and business that are central the border life. The border fence and border patrol are thought to create an unwelcoming atmosphere for Mexicans visiting Brownsville for family celebrations like baptisms and weddings. “Imagine your sister lives just a mile from you across the [border], but you cannot go across the river right there to see her. You must go into town, cross the bridge, wait for an hour at customs, get searched all over, then drive to her. People shouldn’t have to live this way” said Elvia, a woman from Matamoros, lamenting the ways border security belabors formerly routine cross-border visits.

Residents of Brownsville and their Mexican sister city of Matamoros view the border as a soft line. The two cities are often described by residents as being halves of one community and note this close relationship predates the American Revolution and thus the drawing of the border itself. [2] The fence surrounding the graveyard could symbolize border residents’ desire to protect generations of connections between Brownsville and Matamoros from being literally run over by the DHS personnel patrolling the area. However, the skimpiness of the wire fence stands in contrast to the 15-foot steel fence, making it clear who has the upper hand in the negotiation of the meaning of the US-Mexico border. The local view of the border as a point of connection is not shared by the DHS, which approaches the line between the two cities as a strict boundary to be upheld through barriers and armed enforcement. This image reminds us that national security is not just policy in border communities, but is a force restructuring the cross-border relationships that that underscore border life.

References [1]Andreas, Peter. 2009. Border Games. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.[2]Reséndez, Andrés. 2004. Changing National Identities at the Frontier. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press

This photo was taken in a neighborhood called Tijuca which is located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The hills seem to take over the shot but the houses that are located on top of them are the real focal point of the photo. Tijuca is one of the urban areas or favelas of Tijuca.

Historical Aspect

The Brazilians that live there call it home and are very proud of their home. These homes were built at a time when Brazilians of a lower economic class could only live in certain areas. They were literally zoned and pushed out of other areas because of a semi-closed class system and an inability to afford pricier homes in more opportune areas. In the evenings this homes are illuminated by an iridescent lighting source that is provided by the municipality. At night when the homes are lit up, the view of all of the houses on the hills look the same. No one can tell whether one house belongs to a wealthy or a poor family.

Taxonomy

These homes represent a simple brick and mortar vernacular yet are sturdy and maintain the rich culture of the inhabitants. The dwellings are multi-level and house several generations of families. These houses on top of hills are accessible via by foot, bus or automobile. The landscape of the hills boasts a luscious green oasis of towering hills and glorious rooftop views. The trees shown offer shade to the homes and also bear fruit to several local and exotic fares. The irrigation system of Tijuca is represented by the large blue water towers that are connected to a central municipal source that provide water to families in the area. The water is not filtered enough for drinking and even though most families just use it for cooking and washing clothes, many brave individuals drink it as their bodies have built up immunity to it.

Cultural Relativity

This photo was taking during one of the hot, summer months in Brazil. There are some air conditioners shown on the homes in the photo but the open window ritual is seen more vividly. The large, open windows and close proximity of the structures serve a functional purpose of heat reduction and also allows for a strong kinship to be held among the families and their neighbors. It is a place where everyone knows your name and neighbors commune with old friends or nurture new friendships as they stand on top their balconies.

The boy wears signs of poverty and grief on his body and clothes. His tiny tie, long since outgrown, hangs just halfway down his torso. He is what the school administration refers to as a “vulnerable child” a vague and inconsistent category related to the effects of HIV/AIDS. He recently became an orphan, first losing his father and then his mother. Living in a state of limbo, he is uprooted and shuttled between the homes of extended family. His devastation is so profound all words fail description. He is not an anomaly, though, as young people are hit the hardest by the effects of the epidemic. There is estimated to be 1.9 million AIDS orphans in South Africa [1] and the infection rate in KwaZulu-Natal is higher than any other province. [2]

But this is not the face of South Africa usually seen as it often escapes public discourse. This boy in a mask resists prefabricated and rigid concepts of young black South African identity. He collapses notions of the anonymous black “Other,” the victim, the exotic. Thus, pushing at the distance between our “developed” world's understanding and his reality. He wears a mask created from simple materials: paper, paint, and string. But he has made it with his own hands with images from his own imagination. He stands square shouldered, his yellow sunburst disguise in contrast to the dull brick walls and dusty chalkboard. Contrary to cultural decorum for a Zulu child, he does not look downward, but through the mask he meets the viewer's gaze straight on. His smile is soft and his eyes laughing.

On masks and costumes Susan Stewart writes, “The body is paraded, put on display, in time as well as in space; most often those contexts in which it appears are structured so that there is little or no division between participants and audience [...] the body is the work [of art], and there is reciprocity between individuals/works rather than unilinear distance between work and observer.” The boy's mask confronts with its sharp angles and intense colours, existing in what Stewart calls a “democratic space” and a “space of dialogue.” [3] This space lies immediately in front of our line of perception and in it, the mask, like the face, calls for direct exchange. So while the mask hides, it also reveals. Within this dynamic space of communication the boy's presence must be acknowledged. He is made visible. The mask allows, however briefly, a transcendence of differing realities illuminating something from within this young man—his humour, openness, and strength.

1. “HIV and AIDS Estimates 2009,” UNAIDS, accessed April 15, 2012, http://www.unaids.org/en/regionscountries/countries/southafrica/.
2. National Department of Health South Africa, National Antenatal Sentinel HIV and Syphilis Prevalence Survey, (Pretoria, ZA: NDH, 2011).
3. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 107.

The town that I come from is named Hillsborough, and is located in Somerset County, in the dead center of New Jersey. Several towns surrounding mine are Montgomery, Flemington, Princeton, Somerville and Bridgewater. Some of these places such as Princeton, Montgomery and Flemington are considered to be upscale, wealthy areas, while Bridgewater and Somerville are lower key. Hillsborough, however, possesses combined characteristics of all of these places. When you first look at this photograph, you would assume that the three kids staring out over a grassy knoll are wealthy. This is simply because they are hanging out on a golf course. This is an accurate portrayal of the town that we are from. Many older townspeople enjoy activities such as golf, and like to consider themselves upper class. Although our families may be perceived this way, this image does not portray us as wealthy kids. We are the “rugrats” of a wealthy community. As you can tell by our t-shirts and backwards hats, we are not prep school kids that grew up playing golf with our parents. We were the kids that snuck onto the rich golf courses and amused ourselves at other people’s expenses. We would prefer to hit golf balls with baseball bats rather than with golf clubs. Not to say that we were troubled youth, but deviant or mischievous would not be a stretch. In this photograph, we are not wearing polo shirts or khaki pants. We are not holding golf clubs, and are not acting as though we were lucky to be at this golf course. We have the same leisurely stature to us that we possess everywhere that we go. If a groundskeeper at a golf course found these five kids (one not in photo and one took the photo) loitering around their golf course, they would kick us out, assuming that we didn’t belong there. This is an accurate portrayal of the lives that we lived growing up, and continue to live today.

Although we live in an area with a reputation of being proper and upscale, we have not conformed to the town. As the photograph illustrates, the town has conformed to us. Golf courses and fancy restaurants have not made us different people. The majority of us worked in the kitchens of these places growing up rather than eating in them. Despite how kids our age were supposed to act or who they were supposed to hang out with, we chose to do things our own way with the friends that we enjoyed being around, and I feel that this photograph portrays that perfectly.

As my fellow observer and I met this young girl walking with a donkey alongside the road in the middle of the day, it raised automatically two questions: what is she doing here by herself? And why is she not at school like any other children of her age? These are the most natural questioning from a Western point of view.

This photograph highlights two aspects of the gender bias in the development process in developing countries. This girl is one the estimated 72 million children who are not in school. Instead of going to school – as we can guess from the donkey loaded with wood – she is helping the household by getting wood probably to make a fire for cooking becoming at the same time of the too many children victims of child labour.

Secondly, gender perspective is now a global issue which is particularly addressed by the second and the third Millenium Development Goals to ensure that girls like the one in the picture get to go to primary and secondary school and this way be prevented from child labour or early marriage. It aims to achieved the critical objective of women empowerment which has a tremendous impact on the development of a country. This little girl could be and should be an actor of the future prosperity of Haiti. Especially in the very difficult context of Post-disaster reconstruction, her country would need her to be in school. However the dilemma is that her family needs her to be at this very place getting wood for domestic or commercial purpose during the day.

The photograph captures the sadness of this young girl who is not smiling as the children usually do. She looks tired and robbed from the dreams of a simple and carefree a little girl should have. So it reminds us the reality of child labour and especially gender biased discrimination in developing country which get in the way of the education of children and girls in particular.