Published: September 02, 2006 11:01 pm         

Global photographer’s haunting images remind world of life's forgotten people

Haunting visages often invade the slumber of Paul Corbit Brown.

Understandably, the images keep returning in the dark of night, clouding the theater of his mind. Sleep is not always a free and easy companion.

When one has toured the world’s troubled spots, walked from room to room in a ramshackle building stacked with mummified remains of genocide victims in Rwanda, or lived briefly in a Jamaican garbage dump inhabited by 8,000 of the poor, such images are unavoidable.

In his visit to strife-scarred Rwanda, Brown recalled a harrowing night, writing at the time he noticed a gap in the curtains where the darkness was evident.

“Without thinking, I reach and pull it closed, fearing that one or more of those ashen faces might find me here and watch me from the deep black,” he wrote on location.

Brown is carving his niche as a globetrotting photographer, visiting planet earth’s ugly side, a world minus its makeup, exposing the stark reality of life’s forgotten people.

Financed by human rights groups and the sale of his photographs, Brown has seen about a dozen such trouble spots, using his camera to record the sordid side of life.

His objective is to use such imagery to effect change, reversing the inhumanity of man that manifests itself in the world’s killing fields.

Brown’s odyssey took many turns. One pivotal change came when he produced pictures for a nursing home’s brochure that portrayed the facility as an ideal home for the aged, when, in fact, in person, he found it dirty and smelly, and the residents often neglected.

“It was really disturbing to me,” he recalled. “I was thinking that I want to do something with my life. I realized I had a skill and talent I could use.

“I realized that I’m going to come to the end of my life and say, ‘What did I do with all this?’ Do I want to be remembered as a spin doctor? That may be fine for some people. I think all of us have some things inside of us that sort of guide us to where we’re going. My little voice was not satisfied or happy with that or feeling like it was an honest use of my work.”

Brown’s interest in photography blossomed when he watched a Canon television commercial, intrigued by the maze of knobs, dials and buttons — things that were absent from his simplistic Instamatic camera. A science teacher at Mount Hope Junior High took him in, working on their lunch hours to teach him elementary photography and developing.

His first real job was at a one-hour shop at Crossroads Mall. Eventually, he became a standout feature and news photographer at The Register-Herald before answering a higher calling.

Life among the Lakotas

A quilting festival in West Virginia led Brown to some Lakota Indians, and a friendship forged at the gathering led him to a reservation in South Dakota where he learned much at the side of a medicine man who paid him the tribe’s ultimate honor — adopting him as a grandson. Blood relationships, in fact, rank a rung or two lower on the social scale among that tribe, he emphasized.

For almost five years, he lived with the Lakotas, a period in which he completely burned the bridges of commercial photography.

“I was like a caterpillar building a cocoon around itself and being so isolated from everything in the world,” he recalled.

“I had no phone. No post office box. No bank account. No credit cards. Not anything. I was completely incognito. No one could reach me where I was. It was fantastic for me. It allowed me this place to where I could completely remake myself.”

Among the Lakotas, he taught wood shop and photography in Sitting Bull School on the reservation. If the disgust he endured with the nursing home brochure was a turning point, likewise was the joy he felt getting directly involved in humanity as a teacher. Another light bulb was switched on.

“There is a work and a need for people to do work that effects social change,” he decided. “So I dedicated myself to that.”

Before taking a quantum leap, however, he drew on the experiences of a common laborer.

For two summers, he hired out as a roustabout for a traveling carnival, impressing the straw boss with his skills to the point he was put in total charge of setting up rides and ascertaining if they were safe and doubling as the official electrician.

Like a biblical leper colony

Assuming the nation’s capital was the place for social change, Brown heard about a garbage dump that served as a shantytown to 8,000 people in Jamaica and decided to investigate. Food for the Poor bought him a plane ticket, and life then took off on a new and irreversible direction.

Akin to the leper colonies of Biblical days, the downtrodden of Jamaica existed in stark poverty that shocked Brown.

When garbage trucks wheeled in, the poor scuffled over ownership of a cardboard box for makeshift shelter and scraps of food.

“It was unbelievable,” he said. “Every manner of filth you can imagine.”

In rare moments, he found himself the target of crude missiles hurled at him, from soft drink bottles to rocks. Once he leaped atop a van to avoid a knife-wielding pursuer.

“People were poor,” Brown said, in a forgiving attitude. “They were desperate. Desperate times, desperate measures.

“I met so many fabulous, incredible people there. Even the people in the shantytown. People who took me in. I was just there a couple of days. They accepted me. One little old lady, who remains one of my favorite pictures, Miss Violet, took my hand and hugged me. A sweet, little old grandmother type. It was really beautiful.”

Tourists were far removed from the blight of the dump. In fact, Brown found homes of the ordinary surrounded by concrete walls and iron bars.

“It was a typical situation of a corrupt government,” he said, sizing up the chasm of the haves and have nots.

“When you have a corrupt government, everything goes to the top people and everybody else is left to fend for themselves. This is nowhere near the beaches. Nowhere near the resorts.”

Back home, newspaper editors were unimpressed.

“If I see one more picture of a starving child, I’m going to pull my hair out,” one groused.

Brown soon learned the grim side of life doesn’t sell in the mainstream media if the intent is to effect social change.

In the autumn of that same year, a dam gave way in Inez, Ky., unleashing enough sludge to overwhelm two small coal mining communities. Brown got there in time to photograph the aftermath of 6 feet of “thick, horrible, stinking, black sludge” teeming with various toxins.

No one died, but as Brown recalled, “It was a disaster literally larger than the Exxon Valdez.”

Israeli-Arab conflict

Brown spent a few weeks in Israel, gathering input from both sides of a conflict that has been waged, intermittently, since the ancient country was reborn in 1948.

“What I learned there about that conflict was that Palestinians are not bad people,” he said.

“I think our media in the United States continues to promote this idea that Palestinians are this wild bunch of heathen people that just do nothing but instigate trouble against Israel.”

Brown says a tiny minority is fomenting the vicious attacks against Israel.

“Almost without exception, I met incredibly wonderful human beings, people who didn’t speak English but took me in their homes, who fed me, gave me a place to sleep, a ride to the next town,” he said.

An Arab whose son ostensibly was shot execution-style by an Israeli soldier after throwing rocks at a tank told Brown he didn’t want revenge, only an end to the unrest.

Shown a photograph of a friend carrying the teenager’s blood-soaked body away, Brown asked the distraught father, “What will make this right? You want revenge? You want this soldier killed, to go to prison? What would make it right to avenge your son’s death?”

Through tears, the father replied, “If my son’s death could be the last, that would make it right for me. If the killing and fighting in our land could stop, my son’s death I could accept.”

Brown talked with victims in Israel, a land frequently targeted by suicide bombers and other grisly acts of terrorism.

“The interesting thing was many people in Israel I spoke to on the ground, just common people, feel the same way,” he said.

Many Israelis told of sharing dinner with Arab friends and their children sharing the same schools, a shared hope that peace can eventually take root.

One photograph got Brown in hot water with some folks on both sides of the conflict. It depicts an Israeli soldier sharing a portion of his lunch with an Arab boy.

Jewish critics spotted a glowing background around the boy’s head, a halo-like result that actually was a flowering shrub serving as a backdrop.

Jews accused Brown of setting the picture up to show a contrast of an “angelic” youngster and a grim, gun-toting soldier.

“People called me up and read me the riot act,” he said. “Jewish people said I was anti-Semitic for shooting that.”

Some Arabs were equally critical, including some who called to inquire, “Are you trying to tell the world that Jews are all very kind and caring towards our people?”

“All this was, was a beautiful moment where two human beings met one another,” Brown said.

“They left their differences behind. They forgot about the fact that one is born on one side and one is born on the other. They forgot the fact that one’s ancestor was Isaac and one’s was Ishmael. In reality, if you take the Bible into account, it’s so bizarre to me because both of them claim Abraham as their father.”

‘Unspeakable evil’ in Rwanda

No one could argue any points of what he shot in Rwanda, a dozen years after the genocidal campaign that still has much of the world reeling.

“I saw the aftermath of one of the most horrendous acts against humanity you can imagine,” Brown said.

“There is a river of sorrow that runs through the eyes of the people there. On the other hand, what I found in Rwanda was just this amazing human spirit, this will to survive.”

Rather than a genuine civil war or an outside invasion, Brown said, what he encountered was the ghastly residue of genocide executed by a civilian militia with the backing of the government.

Brown recorded the macabre aftermath of humans tortured to death, many of them women raped solely by HIV-plagued troops to infect them. Children watched the horrific death squads at work on their parents in the streets and fled into the jungles, left, at the incredibly tender age of 3, to fend for themselves, then care for toddlers as they grew older.

The globetrotting photographer who had grown up in the Fayette County coal camp of Kilsyth had two words for it — “unspeakable evil.”

Yet, a dozen years removed from the tragedy, Brown saw the survivors of both the Hutus and Tutsis coming together, some of them women forming a co-op to make and sell soap.

“I want to go back to Rwanda,” he said. “The story is compelling. To the eye of the casual observer, things are moving right along in Rwanda these days. But the eyes of so many belie the truth. I dream often of the empty eyes of all the skulls whose lives were ripped, clubbed, raped and tortured away.”

Brown cannot erase the images of skeletons piled high on slatted platforms in buildings. They serve as a reminder to the gory slaughter that left 1 million dead in a scant 100 days.

“Someone asked me if I had become numb by now,” he said.

“The truth is, I’ve become even more sensitive to it and frequently find myself holding tears without being conscious of exactly what my heart is feeling.”

Now 40, Brown has seen much of the world, including Russia and Laos, where bombs left in the Vietnam War still lurk beneath the soil, and has served as a guest lecturer on several campuses.

A book covering his vast experiences is in the offing. When published, he certainly won’t need look far for someone to offer praise in the jackets.

“Paul Corbit Brown is an amazing photographer and a passionate individual,” wrote Krist Rudelius-Palmer of the human rights center at the University of Minnesota.

“His photographs tell stories in a visual form, enabling us to connect our personal lives and journeys with others. They open our hearts to feel our connected human suffering, joy and love. When our hearts are open, our minds can follow and we can understand our one responsibilities in creating a just society where everyone’s human dignity can be respected.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com