The World in Pictures
www.rabble.ca by Daron Letts February 24, 2003
Just a month ago, over 100,000 people from around the world gathered at the third annual World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to subvert neo-liberal debates and articulate revolutionary strategies.
Toronto-based documentary photographer, John Donoghue, cast his lens on swirling crowds as they erupted into spontaneous dancing Samba circles and mirthful street theatrics throughout the week. The streets were filled with a generation of Latin American youth, chanting and raising their fists in solidarity.
Donoghue’s previous photographic projects are visual accounts of communities that struggle to rebuild in spite of the social, economic and environmental wounds inflicted by neo-liberalism. His human rights work (and his camera) have taken him to a coffee plantation in Nicaragua, a Guatemalan refugee camp in Chiapas, a speech by Fidel Castro in Cuba, an election in El Salvador and Yunnan province in rural China.
While at the Social Forum, Donoghue managed to get into the press conference of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez to see him pledge solidarity with the WSF and with Brazilian President Lula at Porto Alegre’s City Hall.
Venezuela at the time was still gripped by massive strikes attempting to pressure Chavez to step down. “I think that event was, in many ways, important for the people back in Venezuela, to see that Chavez was confident enough to leave the country at a time like that,” says Donoghue.
The photos Donoghue brought back to Toronto are a continuation of a theme that informs the body of his work: inner strength in the face of oppression.
“I am amazed by the positive energy that keeps people going,” he says, referring to the tightly packed streets of Porto Alegre during the opening WSF march. “There has to be a sense of community to deal with the hardship. I think that to really build a movement, that kind of energy is needed.”
As the U.S.-led re-invasion of Iraq unfolds, Donoghue plans to continue his photographic chronicle in the streets of New York and Washington, D.C.