HE USUALLY works with celebrities such as Madonna, Kate Moss and Kylie, but fashion photographer Rankin unveiled a very different set of photographs when he opened his latest exhibition in Dublin last night.
He travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with Oxfam to take images of the residents of Mugunga camp, home to 17,000 people displaced by the war.
The exhibition in Wolfe Tone Park, beside the Jervis Centre, will run for about three months.
The people are photographed against Rankin’s trademark white backdrop. One man told Rankin he loved his picture so much he would use it for his coffin.
The exhibition is called Cheka Kidogo, meaning “laugh a little” in Swahili, the phrase that people called out to their friends as they were being photographed.
He said he had tried to show the human side of the conflict. “By taking my celebrity portraiture style of photography and applying it to the survivors in the camps in Congo I have tried to get beyond the statistics,” he said.
“The level of suffering there is horrendous, but it hardly makes the news. I heard awful stories of young girls being raped and people fleeing attacks on their villages.”
The country has lost 5.4 million people to conflict, disease and hunger since 1998 and more than 1,100 women a month have reported being raped.
Jim Clarken, Oxfam Ireland’s chief executive, said he hoped it would raise awareness of the crisis in the Congo.
The exhibition is sponsored by Irish Aid and supported by Dublin City Council.
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