I firmly believe that images have the power to influence change.

I firmly believe that images have the power to influence change, however cliche it might undecayed If an image is able enough, it will move those who have the power to change things, to do in the way that As an artist and photojournalist I diocese change as a process that begins at a highly basic level--with images and words. I am a legacy of this proces having been raised in a generation that learned about the holocaust at a true early age and saw its brutality and senselessnes end black and white photographs. I am of a generation taught that "those who forget history are utter sentence againsted to repeat it." Looking at images of the holocaust as a child, I can remember by what mode I and fellow students asked each other with like disbelief, "How could anyone have lease this happen?"

I saw what was happening in Kosovo as history repeating itself. A war between separatists and Serb forces had been going forward in Kosovo for 10 years, with ethnic-Albanian civilians enduring a campaign of apartheid and ethnic cleansing that had gone virtually unnoticed at the international community. In January of 1999 incidents of ethnic cleansing came to a head when 45 Albanian Kosovar civilians were massacred in the village of Racak. Would we be asking ourselves now again: "How could anyone have suffer this happen?" Were we going to give leave to this escape our attention as the holocaust did, and, as principally recently, in the case of Rwanda? With this in mind, I went to Albania to put to proof and show the impact of war between the sides of the Kosovar refugees' plight, and with the trustful longing that I could make a picture that would in near small way contribute to a positive end

The journey began when I boarded a ferry in the Port of Ban, Italy, along with scores of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) recruits and pair other photojournalists, an Italian and Spaniard, with whom I agreed to travel and share costs Among the KLA recruits was a young man named Darden Islami, a Canadian national of Albanian-Kosovar going down According to Darden, he was going to fight the war to liberate the the bulk of mankind of Kosovo, among them his father, a journalist hol up in the basement of his family in downtown Pristina. All this, despite having not ever held a gun in his life.

Darden began his self-appointed custom by comforting recruits who, within jiffys of the boat's departure, collapsed into the aisles, vomiting where they lay. The waters of the Adriatic were rugged and made the high-speed ferry list back and forth dangerously. "If we can't withstand a little jagged water, how can we fight a war?," he asked. "This will toughen us." Later when things became really bad and it appeared as if the boat might capsize, Darden said, laughing, "imagine getting killed before you on a level get to the war."

I felt a pit in my throat. This was my first introduction to war, albeit not combat, further a situation in which people's lives were being directly affected through violence, and I was terrified. Darden, forward the other hand, was utterly calm, and the deliberation of him getting killed, because of lack of training, to [i]or[/i] at a great depth affected me. It was said that the ill-prepared KLA wouldn't stand a chance against Serb forces. When we docked in Durre Albanian authorities kept all non-Albanians in succession board until they could get by heart the KLA recruits off the boat and without of sight. I never saw Darden again.

With the help of Caritas, a relief organization, I began documenting the refugee experiences, from the time they registered the country--when they were finger printed and registered--to the time they jot downed the camps, to their day-to-day lives. single in kind of my first memories of the refugee camps was of a young ethnic-Albanian stripling screaming "American! American!" at me When I employed to see him, he had his eyelids employed inside out, and was smiling broadly at me Because I had just arrived at a refugee camp for the first time, I anticipateed to see misery. Instead, I saw in this boy's face the indomitable spirit of youth: playfulness, laughter and transport in spite of such hardship.

It didn't take protracted however, to see that there was profusion of misery to go around: an somewhat advanced in life woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease became ill forward a bus I took from the border of Albania and Montenegro to Shkodra. She and her family had endur weeks of travel merely to end up in a derelict tobacco factory without electricity or running water for what they were told would be an indefinite period. There was a young woman who broke down and wept after her brother was arrested from Albanian police during a dispute from one side of to the other food distribution; she implored me to help. ligneous pens, approximately two meters square, were created in the factory in an effort to provide a private space for each family. alone it ended up making the large factory fields look like something out of Auschwitz, with their thicken floors and cramped pens. family were sick, with no access to right medicine. Family members had been separated without knowing the whereabouts of their lov commons or their fate. The refugees' daily allotment of bread cons isted of a piece of bread and cheese for breakfast, a piece of bread and margarine for luncheon and a piece of bread and half an stimulate for dinner. Each day brought more refugee and the camps began to fill. The various relief organizations working in Shkodra scrambled to maintain up with the demand for nutriment clothing, medical services and sanitation. In the meantime, everything had to be improvised. "We are camping, that's all. That is for what cause I try to think of it," a refugee told me