Iraqi Refugees #3 United States, 2009
Digital Photograph, 20" x 30"
Courtesy of the artist


Iraqi Refugees #10 United States, 2009
Digital Photograph, 20" x 30"
Courtesy of the artist

Gabriela Bulisova
The Option of Last Resort:
Iraqi Refugees in the United States

March 9 - May 30, 2010

Historically, documentary photography has played a central role in recording the “inconvenient truths” of the industrial world, from the child labor of the coal mines and textile mills to the despair of the urban slums. It has equally illustrated the anguish and destruction of war. Gabriela Bulisova is a documentary photographer from the former Czechoslovakia, currently based in Washington, DC. Her subjects are the world’s marginalized people in places like Chernobyl, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. She uses her camera to bring the faces of the forgotten to light and to give voice to those she believes have been silenced. Documentary photography, contrary to popular belief, is rarely neutral, and Bulisova follows in the tradition of many of the most passionate of those in her profession, like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hines, whose powerful depictions became the voices of the working poor and the downtrodden in the industrial world, and Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, whose poignant images, through their poetic and evocative vision of the Great Depression, engendered support for President Roosevelt’s economic programs. Like so many great documentary photographers of the past, Bulisova is not a dispassionate observer, but rather an active advocate for her subjects, someone who combines a fierce belief in social justice with sensitivity to the formal elements of the photographic image. She is sensitive to her subjects’ despair and suffering and respects their dignity and resilience in the midst of often-unimaginable hardship. She, like so many socially committed photographers before her, believes that an image can reveal the truth and move the public to take action. The body of work for her DCCA exhibition concentrates on the effects of the Iraqi war, especially on those who have helped the United States and who have been granted asylum in this country. She documents those who acted as interpreters for the U.S. Armed Forces, the U.S. government, and U.S. companies and who now live in fear for themselves and their families. As Bulisova’s powerful images demonstrate, asylum in the U.S. has not provided a tidy ending to their life stories. As is the tradition with much documentary photography, she attaches detailed captions to her images that tell the story in words (recorded words in this case) that we see in pictures. From each—words and image—we learn of the despair, hope, and difficulty of the lives of these individuals.