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Child brides Tehani, left and Ghada pose with their husbands outside their home in Hajjah, Yemen.
Photo by Stephanie Sinclair / VII
Documentary Center brings agony of child marriage to light By Shant Shahrigian sshah@riverdalepress.com
T
Sumeena, 15, before her wedding to a 16-year-old boy in Nepal.
Photo by Stephanie Sinclair / VII
ished families think by giving up their children for early marriage, they are saving themselves and their children hardship, when they are in fact perpetuating the cycle. Anju Malhotra, an expert quoted in one of the films, states that while child marriage is declining, if trends continue, there will be 100 million new child marriages worldwide over the next decade. The equation includes males like a 16-year-old Nepalese boy named Surita who solemnly receives wedding gifts alongside his 15-year-old new wife, Bishal, in one of Ms. Sinclair’s photos. The Bronx Documentary Center offers material on how to get involved, listing organizations dedicated to ending childhood marriage such as Equality Now, the International Center for Research on Women and the Veerni Project. The center also states that every year sees 17,000 teen pregnancies in New York City, with the city’s highest rate of teen pregnancy taking place in the south Bronx. The last image in Ms. Sinclair’s series is of a pregnant 14-year-old Ethiopian named Debitu. A caption relates the girl’s fear of dying during childbirth because she is small. Clutching her wide, bare stomach and wearing a painted cross on her forehead, Debitu seems like a Madonna whom the Renaissance masters were too squeamish to depict. Ms. Sinclair leaves us with a portrait of sacrifice that is devoid of redemption.
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he word surreal comes from combining the French words for “on” and “real” to signify something that is more than real or beyond mundane life. It also connotes paradox, the concurrence of two or more contradictory realities that can produce disorientation, confusion, nausea. The dramatic images of child brides in the Bronx Documentary Center’s current exhibit, Too Young to Wed, impart some of those effects. The photos confront viewers with the combination of two incompatible things — the innocence of childhood and the burdens of sex and marriage — and the result is a surrealistic nightmare. However, photographer Stephanie Sinclair gives us more than an exposé of horrors, which are all too real for the people experiencing them. By capturing the complexity of her subjects’ situations, she breaks down the static genus of victim and humanizes the girls livSimilarly, a picture of an engagement ing in developing areas from Yemen to India. party for an 8-year-old Afghan girl focuses The girls do not ask us for our help, and we more on the ritual than the child bride. Light would be fooling ourselves to think our pity changes anything for them, but Ms. Sinclair’s shines on a woman at the center of a fire while the girl herself, Roshan, stands to the photos also contain an implicit call to action. side, half-hidden in shadow. A close-up photo of an There are far more frowns Ethiopian sex worker that than smiles in the exhibit. But Ms. Sinclair took after the girl Where in one photo, a Yemeni girl’s suffered a beating arouses bright grin conveys a sense to see it a strong sense of sympathy. of levity all the more poignant As a caption describes it, the for the fact the 12-year-old, ‘Too Young to girl, named China, is stunned Nujood, used to be a child Wed’ runs at the as she looks down and holds bride. The girl’s black dress Bronx Documentary her face in her hand while and blood orange scarf creCenter at 614 fresh wounds on her eyes ate a striking visual contrast, Courtlandt Ave. and forehead swell. Viewing while a still younger girl until March 16. The the photo makes us wonder standing with a solemn excenter is open 3-7 what she suffered, and why pression next to Nujood adds p.m. on Thursday — maybe something like the yet another dimension to the and Friday and 1-7 very thought process the girl complex photo. p.m. on Saturday herself underwent at the time. A series of short docuand Sunday. Among Ms. Sinclair’s mix mentaries accompanying the Admission is free. of staged portraits and candid exhibit makes Ms. Sinclair’s shots, she sometimes seems message explicit. The Nationto spare us from a direct conal Geographic photographer frontation with her subjects. In explains she did not want to focus on or critia portrait of a beautiful, cruelly disfigured young Afghan woman named Bibi Aisha, an cize a single culture or religion. She highout-of-focus curtain both frames the compo- lights lack of education as a pervasive reasition and distances us from the person at son for the dangerous practice of childhood the center of it, whose family members cut marriage in many developing countries. Ms. Sinclair states that many impoveroff her ears and nose for trying to run away.