Der Freundeskreis-Willy-Brandt-Haus e.V. presents the photo exhibition One Person Crying - Women and War. Photography by Marissa Roth.
Opening: Thursday, March 7 at 7:30 p.m.
Free Admission/ Identification requested
Opening Remarks
Gisela Kayser, Freundeskreis Willy-Brandt-Haus
Speakers: Marissa Roth, photographer; Ute Westroem (daughter of Hilde Westroem, portrayed in the exhibition)
"In
conjunction with the International Women’s Day, the Freundeskreis
Willy-Brand-Haus will present the exhibition One Person Crying - Women
and War - Photographs by Marissa Roth. Over a time-span of 28 years, the
project led the photographer to numerous countries. It all began
unintentionally with her family’s journey to the home of her
grandparents in the former Yugoslavia -they were killed in 1942 by
Hungarian Fascists- and continued in 1988 with a request by the LA Times
to photograph Afghan women refugees. When she accompanied a group of
doctors on a medical mission in 1999 to photograph refugees in Albania,
she realized that her focus on the immediate and permanent effects of
war on women was becoming a recurring theme of her work. She came full
circle in the spring of 2012, when Roth traveled to Vietnam for the
first time, a place of great personal importance to her. For Roth,
Vietnam was her Coming of Age war. She believes that the images she was
exposed to during her adolescent years, inspired her to become a
photojournalist.
Marissa Roth, born in Los Angeles, USA is a
freelance, internationally published photojournalist and documentary
photographer. She has worked for many newspapers and magazines such as
the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time and Newsweek. She covered a
wide range of topics, from the attempted coup to overthrow the
government of the Philippines to the first elections in post communist
Hungary, to homelessness in Japan, to the survivors of the chemical
disaster of the US company Union Carbide in Bophal, India. Roth was part
of the Los Angeles Times team that received the Pulitzer Prize for the
best local coverage of the LA riots in 1993. She teaches at various
academic institutions, such as UCLA, her alma mater. Her work has been
exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and her photographs are
represented in numerous museums and collections. The Museum of
Tolerance/Simon Wiesenthal Center houses her permanent exhibition of
Witness to Truth - a Portrait series of Holocaust Survivors who
volunteer at the Museum. She is currently working on a new book:
Infinite Light: A Photographic Meditation on Tibet with a foreword by
His Holiness the Dalai Lama."
