Focus on Children

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.”