Searching for humanity in aftermath of war's inhumanity

On this beautiful Sept. 11, people will flock to Chicago's Millennium Park. They'll snap photographs of toddlers frolicking by "The Bean," eating ice cream and splashing in the water beneath the twin video towers, in contrast to the sorrow this date has held for all of us since 2001.

Across the street, in Roosevelt University's Gage Gallery, a stark and stunning photography exhibit opening tonight will give people a glimpse of the aftermath of war and violence from around the globe during the last century. Hosted by the not-for-profit Aftermath Project, the inaugural exhibit is titled "War is Only Half the Story."

"Those six words say it all," says Sara Terry, a former Christian Science Monitor writer-turned-photographer who started the Aftermath Project (www.theaftermathproject.org) in the wake of her own experiences photographing Bosnia after the end of the war there in 1995.

"The end of violence doesn't mean peace," Terry says. "It just means the end of violence."

She says the exhibit, which features photographs from Haiti, Laos, Argentina and the Armenian genocide of the early 20th Century, also might come to Roosevelt's campus in Schaumburg. The exhibit fits nicely with Roosevelt's history of social justice, notes Michael Ensdorf, director of the Gage Gallery, who e-mailed Terry in Sierra Leone to work out details of the exhibit.

"We wanted a very raw, immediate feel - no frames, no mattes, no preciousness," says Ensdorf, a Roosevelt communications professor who teaches photography and other classes in Chicago and Schaumburg. "We focus on the big issues - the 9-11s - and there is more that can be said. People are out in the world photographing this stuff every day, trying to get the word out."

The media, and society, fall prey to "fatigue," Terry says. We jump on the stories of war, and lose interest by the time we should be coping with reconstructing societies and rebuilding relationships.

"I really thought that 9-11 was really going to open the door to a better understanding of aftermath in the United States," Terry says. "But it really didn't. We've reacted to it, but we haven't reflected on it-That door closed quickly."

With 24-hour news cycles and the Internet rushing to bring us the latest, we often don't spend much time truly thinking about what we see in the news.

"It deeply disturbs me that we are the culture we are right now," Terry says. "We don't reflect on things. There's no space for considering those quiet moments, and sorrows, and small heroic acts."

From Andrew Stanbridge's color photograph of a scrap-metal collector in Laos hoisting his found grenade, to Paula Luttringer's stark photograph of a prison cell in Argentina where a woman was tortured, to Asim Rafiqui's look at violence and repression in Haiti, the exhibit tells the stories of aftermath.

"This is what it looks like. This is what it takes," says Terry. "If we just tell ourselves the stories of war and inhumanity, we sort of deaden our souls. War tells us what it means to be inhuman, and in the aftermath, we discover again what it means to be human-We don't give the last word to war, to hatred."

The exhibit, which features Kathryn Cook's Aftermath Project award-winning look at Turkey in the wake of the Armenian genocide of the early 1900s, opens with a reception and talk by Terry from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. today at the Gage Gallery, 18 S. Michigan Ave., in Chicago. The gallery is free and open to the public from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. on weekdays. For further information, visit www.roosevelt.edu/gagegallery.