Photo by Luca Zordan, from the new book The Children of South Africa.
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The photo book The Children of South Africa has just been published, after over a year of hard work by our own Luca Zordan and the stylist Alethea Gold, and there’s going to be a benefit auction in New York to honor this important project and the youths it is designed to help. Celebrity event planner extraordinaire and interior designer Colin Cowie will be hosting the event, scheduled for 6:30 pm on June 16 at Mina Gallery, 32A Cooper Square in the East Village. To attend, you’ll need to RSVP by this Friday, June 11. (See invite below.)
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Luca and Alethea traveled numerous times throughout South Africa for the book, photographing (in Luca’s case) and interviewing (in Alethea’s) children from all walks of life. They came back with tales of hardship but also of hope and joy and progress, and the complexity of these stories offers much-needed perspective on this evolving African country.
Luca Zordan and Alethea Gold.
Like their last collaboration, The Children of China, The Children of South Africa is a pro bono project intended to raise not just awareness but also funds to help children in need.
“100% of the profits are being donated directly to the MaAfrika Tikkun charity (of which Nelson Mandela is the chief patron) to support orphans and vulnerable children in South Africa,” according to the book’s website, thechildrenofcouthafrica.org. “Specifically the proceeds from the sale of the book will subsidise sports and soccer programs for HIV/AIDS affected orphans and vulnerable children in 6 townships.”
To see pages from the book, go here. And to see more of Luca’s South Africa photos, click here. And hopefully, we’ll see you at the benefit next week.
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Related:
“The new visual stories of ‘Africa,’” by David Campbell
Luca Zordan’s new project celebrates, and elevates, the children of South Africa
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One Comment
Would love to see this show! (Am presently in Edenton, North Carolina, working on historic preservation of a historic home here.) During the early 1960′s, I did a lot of black & white photography in Africa (1963-64 in Senegal and Mauretania, while a Peace Corps Volunteer, then again as the first African Program Director for the NGO International Rescue Committee, in what was the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now, Botswana)…I spent 1965-6 in that country, keeping South African and SouthWest African refugees alive–all had escaped apartheid in the “Republic” of South Africa and also the “UN mandated” country of South West Africa (now Namibia), which was under the thumb of S. Africa. There were at that time 11,000 political prisoners held in dentention or prison in S. Africa at that time. (Unfortunately, all of my negatives from 1962-68 sunk in a ocean freighter incident in Sept. 1968, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence…) However, some of my photos from Senegal were purchased by the National Council of Churches/Church World Service, and are enlarged and framed, hanging on the walls of their headquarters in Riverside Drive in New York City, since 1965.
Best wishes to all for this upcoming event in NYC, and great to see that some of needed social changes have occured since the dark days of the mid-1960′s in South Africa!