Speech by U.S. Ambassador Charles Ray

It’s a great pleasure to be here tonight and welcome you to the opening of Giving Voice to the Voiceless, this astounding new exhibition from photojournalist Ed Kashi. We are delighted to have Mr. Kashi here with us tonight. Ed, thank you for being here and for sharing your brilliant work with us. It’s a pleasure to also welcome the Honourable minister David Coltart. Minister, we are grateful for the opportunity to share this evening with you and to thank you for your tireless work in supporting the arts here in Zimbabwe. I’d also like to thank Doreen Sibanda, Raphael Chikukwa and the rest of the National Gallery staff who worked so hard in making this exhibition possible. Your assistance in bringing Mr. Kashi’s work to the people of Zimbabwe has been wonderful and we are truly thankful to have such dedicated partners.

And to the rest of our guests here this evening, I’d like to extend a warm welcome and a sincere thank you. Your presence here tonight is a show of support not only for the arts, but also and perhaps more importantly for the phenomenal work of photojournalists, whose dedication to telling the stories of the too0often forgotten people of this world is nothing short of heroic. You see, while this exhibition presents us with a sampling of work from Mr. Kashi’s prolific career, t also stands as a tribute to the noble field of photojournalism, a tribute to those men and women who use their cameras to tell some of the world’s most compelling stories-to give a voice to the voiceless.

For the photojournalist, telling these stories often comes with great risk. They continually thrust themselves into situations from which the average person would flee. Yet, through these risks they introduce us to people, places and situations that we might only read about, to stories we would never otherwise know. And for all that risk, the photojournalist is given an incredible responsibility. As they witness and experience the most personal intimate and vulnerable moments of an individual’s life, moments that show indignity and incivility, photojournalist do their part to not only give these people a voice but also to return to them their dignity and civility.

In this, Mr. Kashi’s work represents photojournalism at its best. It echoes the words of American photographer Arnold Newman who said, ‘We don’t take pictures with our cameras. We take them with our hearts and we take them with our minds and the camera is nothing more than a tool. Indeed the care and compassion he shows for each individual in these photos is what allows their voices to be heard so loudly and their stories to be told so clearly.

Whether it’s the Nigerian woman forced to bake her tapioca with the heat of an oil pipeline gas fire, the Vietnamese girl suffering from Agent Orange disabilities or the Kurdish woman returning home to Kirkuk after 20 years of displacement, we see them first and foremost as human beings with incredible stories to tell. Stories that if we hear them correctly will stir us, move us and inspire in us the desire to do something, anything to make this world a better place. This is why the work of photojournalists is so important. You and I see each other fairly often at events like this.

We know each other’s faces. We at least in part each other’s stories. But the people surrounding us tonight in this exhibition are those people who do not see often enough. And we would know nothing about them or their stories if not for the work of photojournalists like Ed Kashi. Thank you again for being here tonight and for joining us in celebrating the opening of this wonderful exhibition.