Rudy von Bernuth is the Vice President and Managing Director of the Children in Emergencies and Crisis Development at Save the Children US. He is responsible for all of the agency’s international emergency responses, food security programs working with children in conflict situations, and child exploitation. In 1979, when he was with CARE, he witnessed the Khmer people fleeing from Cambodia to Thailand. He recorded what he saw with his camera, and one photo ended up on the cover of a U.S. government publication. He then realized that he could share with others what he experienced through photographs.

Since then von Bernuth has photographed village rituals, the seasonal rhythms of agrarian cultures, the mix of misery and beauty, timeless patterns and rhythms, needless disease and death. As he looks back on 30 years of photographs, he is struck by how much of what he photographed is disappearing or has already disappeared as “global progress” has reached the smallest villages in developing countries all over the world.

The Westport Historical Society is honored to showcase these meaningful photographs that dramatically display a hardened reality for many children in war-torn areas of the world. The exhibit will officially open on Sunday September 30 and will run through the end of December.

 

A Statement from Rudy von Bernuth . . .

A Terrible Beauty

"In October, 1979, more than 30,000 Cambodians in the most abject conditions were moved by bus from jungles on the Cambodian frontier to a refugee camp in Thailand, sixty miles from the border. It was the beginning of a mass migration of Khmers fleeing the desolation left in the wake of the Pol Pot regime, and it was the beginning of my efforts to photograph the world in which I worked. That first day in Saikeo when I was confronted by despair, disease and death, I tried to record what I was seeing. When, several months later, I saw one of the photos I had taken that day on the cover of a US government publication, the idea that I could share what I saw with others by means of my photography was affirmed.

Over the years since 1979, my camera has been the means by which I have explored and appreciated the world in which I work. During normal hours my job has focused my attention on doing something to help children and their families survive in an often very hostile environment. But in the dawn hours and early evening, my camera was the pass key to village rituals and the seasonal rhythms of agrarian cultures, very different from the world from which I came.

As I look back over almost 30 years’ efforts, I am continuously struck by how much of what I have photographed is disappearing or has already disappeared, as “global progress” reaches even to Timbuktu and the villages of Bangladesh and Nepal. The Hanoi I visited in 1986 was still mostly the colonial capital the French had left behind in the 1950’s, with bicycles and rickshaws on the sleepy avenues, and the grand but shuttered Hotel Metropole had not yet become an ultra swank Sofitel in the midst of urban congestion.

The world I have tried to capture always startled me with the inextricable mix of misery and beauty, timeless patterns and rhythms, needless disease and death, a terrible beauty I have tried to capture while working for change."

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