Snap.
A child eats breakfast.
Snap, snap.
A kid rolls on the ground.
Snap, snap, snap.
A teenager laughs.
“Kids who might have been marginalized in their communities, when given a camera, can validate their lives,” said Rebecca Drobis, a photographer who is bringing cameras—and empowerment—to children in difficult circumstances.
Drobis and I met each other as freshmen at Duke University, and by the time we were twenty-two and teaching school together in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, Drobis’s interest in law school had been quashed by her love of the camera and what it can do for those in less fortunate circumstances.
The hot, dirty, vibrant colors of the Dominican Republic, and the visual entrée into lives of the poor, helped fuel her current career. She captures the mundane and uses it as a platform to highlight the similarities between people in the face of vast differences in life circumstances.
“My favorite pictures, and the ones that communicate the best, are where you see someone who is in a very different situation than you but is doing something very normal, like eating breakfast,” she said.
It’s this juxtaposition that helps highlight the human rights issues at stake in a boys prison in Mexico and a Native American reservation in Montana—a couple of the places Drobis has brought cameras.
Drobis spent last summer on Montana’s Blackfeet Reservation, on the edge of Glacier National Park. She had never seen, in any of the countries she’s been to, the level of desperation she witnessed on the reservation. She is now organizing a photography program for the children who live on the reservation. They will be given cameras, and by photographing themselves in their environment, she hopes they will improve their relationship with the landscape.
The elders who struggled to retain their ties to their land are dying, and the younger generation has become distanced from—while remaining chained to—the land.
“There’s so much alcoholism, so much trash, illiteracy, it’s so poor and there’s no way out,” Drobis said. “It’s so ironic because there is so much wealth and beauty on the land. If they could work really well with what they have and get back to their roots, at least spiritually, they’d be better off.”
Three years ago, Drobis was working at a photography workshop in Mexico and gained access to a demographic that she would not have had access to in the United States—a boys’ prison in Guanagato, about two hours north of Mexico City. She bought the boys point-and-shoot, throw-away cameras and encouraged them to document their lives.
“At the end of the day, they’re just boys,” she said of the eleven- to seventeen-year-olds. “They had friendships and riffs and things they care about.”
She said some of the boys were in the prison for “very, very small crimes, like stealing because they’re so poor,” and some of them were in for rape.
“I think it’s incredibly important for journalists and photographers to be able to show the world what’s happening inside a correctional institute,” she said. “These are young kids and they need the same things as anyone else.”
Drobis said that while the boys were not being mistreated “in any shape or form,” the fact remained that the boys slept eight to a small room and called their home a jail that was three bus rides from the closest city.
In one of Drobis’s photos of the youth prison boys are doing push-ups while the sun slants across them. In another, plates piled upon plates show the meal to come—hard boiled eggs plopped on beans, with yellow and blue forks as accents. In yet another, two boys with their arms around each other stare at the camera.
“The biggest impact was on the kids,” Drobis said. “They loved it and were really, really grateful and were respectful and appreciative. They thought it was amazing that someone from the United States would want to volunteer and spend two weeks with them.”
