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Exhibition documents lives of refugees
Justin Lee, Love is All Around, 2011, Photograph
“Journey to Freedom,” a photographic series documenting the lives of refugees at the Vive Inc. shelter in Buffalo, will open with a public reception June 30 from 6-8 p.m. in the UB Anderson Gallery.
The exhibition, which will free and open to the public, will be on view through July 22. The Anderson Gallery is located at One Martha Jackson Place near Englewood and Kenmore avenues.
“Journey to Freedom,” with photos by William Bergmann and Justin Lee, chronicles through black-and-white photography the experiences of people taking refuge at Vive Inc., a non-profit, humanitarian organization located on Buffalo’s East Side that assists refugees seeking protection in Canada and the United States. For many of the individuals and families residing at Vive, freedom means safety, stability and hope.
From November 2011 to May 2012, Bergmann and Lee met, photographed and listened to the stories of the refugees who had fled from their countries to the United States in search of freedom.
Lee’s photographs symbolically convey the refugees’ plight as they step into the light of freedom from the darkness of their past. Bergmann uses the American flag to depict the movement of these people’s lives through their journey to freedom.
The exhibition features additional paintings and sculptures by Bruce Bitmead, Catherine Shuman Miller and Ben Ami Shemer.
The largest refugee shelter in the United States, Vive has served more than 84,000 asylum seekers from 106 countries since its founding in 1984. In 2011, Vive served more than 4,000 refugees, 60 percent of whom were women and children.
Bergmann is a senior at UB majoring in visual studies with a concentration in photography. He says he is drawn to the medium because of the way documentary images can be manipulated by light to create alternate realities and suggest metaphoric ways to interpret the depicted subject matter.
Lee is a recent UB graduate who received a BA in psychology with a minor in photography. He says he became interested in photojournalism his sophomore year when he served as the photographer and assistant photo editor for The Spectrum, UB’s student-run independent newspaper. Lee documents life with a creative eye toward creating a mixture of fine art photography and photojournalism. He works as a freelance photographer based in New York City. To learn more about Lee’s work, visit his website.
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