Impressions: South Sudan features photographs by Michelle Gabel, a photojournalist with the Syracuse Media Group and graduate student at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, and Bruce Strong, a multimedia storyteller and Newhouse School professor.
Maureen Sieh’s commentary provides a background for the photographs. Now an independent journalist based in Africa, Sieh is a former reporter and editor for Syracuse Newspapers, where she focused on ethnic community issues. Made on separate trips, Strong’s and Gabel’s photographs represent specific conditions and struggles of the South Sudanese before the formation of an autonomous South Sudan in 2011.
While these images are specific to a time and place-after the second Sudanese civil war, which ended in 2005-the photographs reflect the rampant poverty and public health crisis as well as the dignity and grace of a people who persevere despite centuries of conflict. Sieh’s commentary is based on her 2009 trip to South Sudan and her decade-long experience reporting on the Lost Boys, dating from their arrival in Syracuse in 2001. The exhibition reminds us of the debilitating effects of all wars -those in Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and other nations including South Sudan, where the situation remains in flux and renewed violence continues today.