© Marissa Roth: Sara Duvall with a photo of her son Aaron Reed, killed in Iraq, Chillicothe, Ohio, 2005
Willy-Brandt-Haus Wilhelmstraße 140 / Stresemannstraße 28 10963 Berlin-Kreuzberg Allemagne
The topic Women and War has taken photographer Marissa Roth to many countries over a time span of 28 years. It began in 1984 with a family trip to the former Yugoslavia, home of her Jewish grandparents - who were murdered by Hungarian Fascists in 1942 - and in 1988 with a commission by the Los Angeles Times to portray Afghan women refugees. Accompanying a medical mission and photographing refugees in Albania in 1999, she realized that the focus of the immediate and permanent effects of war on women was a recurring theme in her work. In addition to the photographs, the exhibition features the stories of the women portrayed and how the war irrevocably altered their lives.
© Marissa Roth: Hilde Westroem, Survivor of World War II, Berlin, Germany 2008
“This project brought me face to face with hundreds of women, who endured the war and the related experience of loss, pain and unimaginable hardship and how they survived it. I traveled around the world, photographing and interviewing women, recording their history, capturing gestures and gruesome details to document how war has altered their lives irrevocably. I was compelled to give faces and voices to war seen from the women’s perspective. In the photos there are no signs of blood or weapons. They only show life, lived with an eternal postwar backdrop.“
Marisssa Roth, born in the USA, is a freelance photojournalist and documentary photographer. She worked for numerous newspapers and magazines, such as The New York Times, Time Magazine and Newsweek. Roth was part of the Los Angeles Times team, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for best local reporting about the riots in Los Angeles. She teaches at several academic institutions. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions and is represented in Museums and collections.