DIGNITY: Tribes in Transition


  • Photographer
    Dana Gluckstein
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    Dana Gluckstein Inc.
  • Date of Photograph
    2010
  • Technical Info
    Archival Pigment Photographs

These images depict the contradictions facing this ancient and mystical Himalayan culture whose admirable gross national product is measured in moments of happiness rather than the acquisition of material things. An on-slaught of Bollywood and Hollywood images since television’s introduction in 2000, however, threaten traditional values. At a religious festival, a school boy dressed in his traditional gho crouches with his toy rifle. Whether photographing a Haitian healer or Bhutanese farmer, the artist’s intention is to infuse each portrait with an essential human grace.

Story

The DIGNITY: TRIBES IN TRANSITION exhibition, photographed by Dana Gluckstein, explores the theme of “tribes in transition” by capturing the fleeting period of world history where traditional and contemporary cultures collide. The “tribes” are the 370 million Indigenous Peoples who comprise approximately 6% of the world’s population and are amongst its most impoverished and oppressed inhabitants. The DIGNITY exhibition and associated book, DIGNITY: In Honor of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, includes subjects from Australia, Bali, Bhutan, Botswana, Canada, Fiji, Haiti, Kenya, Mexico, Namibia, Peru, the United States, and Zambia. The photographs distill the universality of experience that links us all without diminishing the dignity of the individual. DIGNITY, in association with Amnesty International for their 50th anniversary, helped create the “tipping point” for President Obama to adopt the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In 2011, DIGNITY exhibited at the U.N. in Geneva in 2011. Gluckstein spoke at the World Economic Forum, 2013, in Davos, Switzerland on how art can impact change in the world

The most recent photographs created for the DIGNITY exhibition feature Bhutan. These images depict the contradictions facing this ancient and mystical Himalayan culture whose admirable gross national product is measured in moments of happiness rather than the acquisition of material things. An on-slaught of Bollywood and Hollywood images since television’s introduction in 2000, however, threaten traditional values. At a religious festival, a school boy dressed in his traditional gho crouches with his toy rifle. Whether photographing a Haitian healer or Bhutanese farmer, the artist’s intention is to infuse each portrait with an essential human grace.

Robert S. Sobieszek, the late curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who collected Gluckstein’s photographs for the museum explained: “The portraits taken by Dana Gluckstein evidence a clear attempt to reinvest portraiture with that something that was lost some time ago. And that something is nothing less than the desire, or the requirement, to express the character and moral quality of the sitter in such a way that far more than likeness is suggested if not exactly revealed… Gluckstein bestows upon her sitters a sense of stilled dignity…”

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