Oxfam America Blog

Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

This morning I saw an intriguing note from my Oxfam colleague Liz Lucas about yesterday’s post on Lens, The New York Times’ blog on photography, video, and visual journalism. “The picture on this blog is unbelievably beautiful,” Liz wrote. “Check out the photo and the forum debating whether photos of suffering constitute art.”

I should say that, although the written word is my medium, I’m a huge photography fan. I can spend hours exploring the hidden treasures on photo sharing sites like Flickr. Though I try to observe the details around me, I find that photos (even my own) often show me things that I’ve never noticed before.

The picture Liz was writing about is no exception. Taken by AP photographer Emilio Moranatti, it centers on a young boy sleeping soundly among the soft, misty folds of a mosquito net. The moment seems like a tranquil one, hushed and comfortable–until you read the caption and learn that the boy is a displaced person, living in a refugee camp outside Peshawar, Pakistan.

Moranatti’s photo made me think of another image of a young boy, perched in the wreckage of a bombed-out building in Gaza, cheerfully eating a piece of bread. This photo, taken by my colleague Kenny Rae, was featured on our Oxfam blog in February, and was recently named a finalist in InterAction’s 7^th Annual NGO photo contest.

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Jamil Hamzah walks through rice fields in Gampang Ladang, Indonesia, where Oxfam helped farmers purchase rice paddy seed. According to a new UN report, Indonesia is one of just seven countries where 65 percent of the world’s hungry people live. Photo: Jim Holmes/Oxfam

Each day, the epidemic is spreading further across the globe, extending its tendrils into every nation on earth. It strikes women and children first, as well as the poorest among us. Nearly 1 billion people are already affected, and this year alone, an additional 40 million more suffered its symptoms: fatigue, dizziness, extreme weakness, even death.

The thing is, you don’t read much about this epidemic in the headlines these days. No one’s handing out ribbons or marching for a cure. Though it’s treatable, people aren’t doing much to prevent it. In fact, hardly anyone seems to be paying attention.

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