Population & Social Environments

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/salgado/salgado.html

While our population continues to grow exponentially, our beloved planet remains the same size. The lack of space and resources in many areas force huge numbers of people to move from rural areas into bustling cities; but not as normal residents, but as “squatters”. These people are lured to the cities by modernization and the often-illusory hope of finding a job. The “squatters” are then subject to unbearable living conditions, and exposed to numerous dangerous diseases. The victims of this tragedy are in dire need of help, and it is our responsibility, as a society, to provide that assistance.

What You Can Do:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/world/2006/urbanisation/default.stm
www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/pid/2

Shehzad Noorani- Daughters of Darkness

SHEHZAD NOORANI
Photography is a way to document peoples stories through a single frame. Shehzad Noorani uses his talent in photojournalism to bring the stories of the children of prostitutes to center stage. Child prostitution has been a taboo subject for too long. In the world’s quest to create a utopia, the hardships of reality are ignored and the people who need our help are cast into the shadows. In these shadows, girls as young as 14 are thrown to the streets with prostitution as they’re only means of income. Women are subjecting themselves to alcohol, drugs, and diseases just to make ends meet. Shehzad Noorani has finally exposed these playthings of the ignorant to an audience previously content with the time-old cliché “ignorance is bliss”. Now with open eyes, will you choose to gawk at the subject or take action? If you chose the latter, begin to do so through Captive Daughters.
To see his works, go to:
Fiftycrows.org
Flickr

We feel that consumerism is an important topic to educate people about because sometimes individuals pay too much attention to what their spending their money on and not how much their spending on it. Consumerism is all marketing and commercial tactic. It’s interesting to see how people can be fooled so easily by the whole quality vs. quantity aspect when the quality is double the cost of the quantity. For example, A person would much rather have a real fur coat then a fake when a fake would cost at least five times less and look exactly the same as the real one.

Poverty

www.namaste-direct.org/

The Bottom Billion

Poverty matters because while people living in first-world countries, like America, take the smallest things, like clean water, a sanitary environment, communication, technology, and other details, for granted, millions of people in the world live without any of these modern “essentials.” People die everyday from hunger and malnutrition, when these consequences can be fixed. The disastrous results of poverty must now be addressed.


Links:

www.pih.org/youcando/donate.html
www.bridgestoprosperity.org
www.ewb-usa.org/donate.php
www.one.org/about/
www.wfp.org
www.actionagainsthunger.org
www.kiva.org/about/how

Child Consumerism

Consumerism: Consuming our culture, one child at a time

Consumerism is creating insecurities in children, who grow up to think that shopping is the answer to the void they may feel. Ads appear everywhere and we’re exposed to several thousand a day, with digitally altered photos, so our children end up believing that real women should look “perfect.” Children should not be under the pressure to “make” themselves the ideal women or man, as we see in the Evolution video that what you see in the media is not the true woman, but the children walking on the street only see the edited photo. We think this topic is important because parents and young adults should reach out and teach children that everyone is beautiful just the way they are.

Lauren Greenfield's gallery:
http://www.laurengreenfield.com/index.php?p=CCLHWY93

Thirsty World

photograph by Brent Stirton

Our natural resources are diminishing day by day all over the world. In our everyday lives, we don’t always realize the amount of clean water we consume in our privileged lifestyles. Viewing the photos that Brent Stirton should change the way we see our communities. We ask you if we can all work together to limit the amount of water we use everyday. The photographed communities are living under tremendous stress to merely survive with contaminated waters; once large lakes, have shriveled to small ponds that cannot sustain towns. We should always keep these images in our minds, and help our neighbors, as we would want them to help us.

http://www.brentstirton.com/feature-water_issues.php

-> Brent Stirton’s photography artwork about global water crisis.

http://www.worldwater.org/

-> A website to show the information on the world’s water resources.

http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/

-> A website that contains various articles of water issues and photography works related to global water crisis.

By Joon and Rachel

The Lost Girls/Beloved Daughters

Photograph by Fazal Sheikh
From the pamphlet "Beloved Daughters"

Photograph by Fazal Sheikh
From the pamphlet "Beloved Daughters"
http://www.fazalsheikh.org/

Childhood Lost, Nothing Gained

While Poverty and World Hunger are serious and well-known problems in our world today, there is another problem, one that far less people know about, and that is child marriage. Child marriage is a custom in some countries, where girls are married usually as young as thirteen. In other cases, however, daughters have been used as payment for things such as gambling and are married as young as eight years old. Other parents who cannot afford to pay and support their children also marry them off to older men.

Child marriage is a huge problem because many young girls are affected by it. It damages them socially, emotionally and physically and their lives are obliterated-they do not receive basic schooling once they are married and are expected to stay at home to cook and clean…and eventually produce children to make a family. Child marriage also increases the spread of HIV, an epidemic we are desperately trying to stop.

We, as a group, were interested in this topic because we are young girls ourselves. We are also 15-the age that most child brides get married at- and we cannot imagine being married off and taken away from our families at this time in our lives. At this age we should be making friends, having fun and gaining important knowledge in school. Those are all things that child brides will not have a chance to do and will never be able to do if they remain married.

Learn more:

PBS: “Child Brides,” NOW

www.pbs.org/now/shows/341/take-action.html

International Women’s health Coalition

www.iwhc.org/getinvolved

International Center for Research on Women

www.icrw.org/html/donate/donate_ask.htm

See more of Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs:

www.sthephaniesinclair.com