Children eat the staple diet of rice from a communal bowl. During the end of the dry season, there is little to eat and many villagers will have only one meal of rice each day ? but what they have, they will share equally among the family and guests.
In a culture where the opportunities for women to be honored, celebrated, and recognized are few, circumcision becomes disproportionately significant ? in spite of the pain it brings.
A Kashmiri man paddles to a floating market in the early freezing temperatures before sunrise on Dal Lake in the summer capital of Kashmir, Srinagar India, November 24, 2001. In the background, echoing through the nearby mountains, gunshots and fighting could be heard. Kashmir was once a tourist hotspot but now vendors struggle to survive in a place that has seen nearly 1000 civilians killed this year alone and 1,765 wounded in a brutal conflict that the United Nations calls the most dangerous place in the world.
Kashmiri men pray inside the Jama Masjid mosque during Ramadan in Srinagar, the summer capital of the state of Kashmir in India, November 20, 2001. Kashmir has seen over 900 civilians killed this year and 1,765 wounded in a brutal conflict that the United Nations calls the most dangerous place in the world.
hotojournalist Ami Vitale is on the road less traveled. Often unpaved, and at times dangerous, that road has taken her in the last three years, to places of surreal beauty and civil unrest. It has also taken her to places where there is extreme poverty and horrible destruction of life and property, and to villages where there is no running water or electricity, places she describes as ?worlds apart.? But it is not the differences that have drawn Vitale to them; it is the commonality of human emotions and life experiences that have irrevocably bonded her with the people she has photographed in them.
Vitale?s photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report and The New York Times, among others and two stories which she completed in 2001 in Guinea Bissau and Mauritania placed first in the National Press Photographers Association Best of Photojournalism. In 2000, Vitale was the recipient of several grants, including one from the Alexia Foundation, which enabled her to travel to Africa to work on a story she called ?Notes from a Mud Hut.? The story had germinated in 1995 while visiting her sister who had been living in Guinea Bissau while working for the Peace Corps.
