By Jason Cone, Communications Director, MSF-USA

Over the past few decades, the image of emaciated, fly-ridden children on the brink of death from famines and other catastrophe has come to define the visual representation of childhood malnutrition. And in this media saturated world, flush with information documenting the daily toll of human suffering, it is understandable that a visual immunity has developed as a line of defense against this clichéd imagery provoking any kind of an emotional response to tackle the crisis of childhood malnutrition head on.

It was in this context that Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) challenged seven of the most accomplished and award-winning photographers to capture a new visual identity for malnutrition. VII Photo’s Marcus Bleasdale, Jessica Dimmock, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair, and John Stanmeyer willingly stepped into the breach to try to rewrite the story of the 195 million malnourished children worldwide.

They traveled to rural villages, war zones, teeming capitals, and mountain hideaways to document childhood malnutrition and its varied faces: the incongruity of malnourished children in lush and bountiful Congo; the cyclical nature of malnutrition in Bangladesh; a young mother and her struggle to access the foods she knows her children need to grow and thrive amid the annual “lean season” in the Sahel.

Edited by the documentary filmmakers at Herzliya Films, VII Photo’s startling images will be revealed in a seven-part mini-documentary series on StarvedForAttention.org over the coming weeks. And tonight, at the TimesCenter in New York City, exhibit attendees will be able to get a sneak preview of the films as displayed on LG INFINIA flat screen televisions and through a panel discussion moderated by NBC News anchor Ann Curry, with global health experts, activists, MSF aid workers, and VII photographers. (You can also watch the event streamed live.)

In “Frustration,” the first film to be released online, Marcus Bleasdale follows MSF outreach workers deep into Djibouti City’s slums to seek out malnourished children and inform their families of available treatment, and captures the frustration—and successes—of the staff at the 35-bed MSF nutrition hospital. While more than 1,700 children were treated in 2009, they know that’s just the tip of the iceberg outside the clinic’s doors – a mounting crisis that is hidden and elusive.

Photographer Jessica Dimmock’s “A Mother’s Devotion,” opens a window into the life of Natasha, a young mother living in a poverty-stricken village in rural Burkina Faso, as she struggles to keep her year-and-a-half-old son Alexi well nourished.

With intimate portraits and striking landscape images, photographer Ron Haviv’s “Terrifying Normalcy,” documents a community at the mouth of the Meghna River in southern Bangladesh that is resigned to the fact that malnutrition is part of the daily cycle of life.

In a somber, yet bold, reportage, captured in the Democratic Republic of Congo, photographer Franco Pagetti reveals the daily struggle to survive in North Kivu Province’s forbidding bush and teeming, fetid displaced persons camps, where food is scarce and the people are on edge, ready to run at a moment’s notice. He follows Bahati, a severely malnourished one-year-old boy—born displaced rather than on his father’s farm—and in “The Malnutrition that Shouldn’t Be,” documents the efforts of an MSF team trying to save him and hundreds of other children cut off from the nutritious food they need.

Photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair turned her lens on an MSF program in India’s Bihar State, which treats children at the epicenter of one of the world’s malnutrition hotspots. In “Invisible,” Sinclair’s images capture how children descend from generations of a chronically under-nourished population, making malnutrition more difficult to spot.

A young woman in labor bounces in a pick-up truck as it races down a rutted mountain road deep in rural Oaxaca State, Mexico, rushing to a birthing clinic that is part of national program, Oportunidades. In “A Solution from Within,” photographer John Stanmeyer chronicles health workers traversing mountain passes, going village to village, house to house, targeting pregnant and lactating women and children under two, underscoring how it is possible to confront childhood malnutrition in even the most remote and isolated parts of a country.

In a nation that provides half of the world’s food assistance, why is substandard food being sent to the poorest corners of the earth while a US government program provides nutritious foods to its own most vulnerable citizens? Photojournalists Antonin Kratochvil and Jessica Dimmock strikingly capture the double standard of US food aid policy in “The US Standard” and “A Double Standard.”

At its core, Starved for Attention, offers the opportunity to discard preconceived notions of malnutrition and confront in vivid detail the great potential that exists today to combat early childhood malnutrition. But we need your help to rewrite this story. Sign the petition today and spread the word far and wide.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Campaign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.