Marissa Roth – One Person Crying: Women & War

“One Person Crying: Women and War” is a 25-year, personal global photo essay that addresses the immediate and lingering effects of war on women.  

In an endeavor to reflect on war from what I consider to be an under-reported perspective, the project brought me face to face with hundreds of women who endured and survived war and its ancillary experiences of loss, pain, and unimaginable hardship.  I traveled the world photographing, interviewing, and writing down their histories, noting gestures and gruesome details, in order to document how war irrevocable changed their lives.  Women are the touchstones for families and communities and are often relied upon to keep everything held together during a war or conflict.  Often there is no time for them to assess their own traumas afterward, let alone speak of them in order to process the experience.  I was compelled to put faces and give voices to the other side of war.  There is no blood or any guns in the images, just the record of lives lived with a never-ending post-war backdrop.

Addressing this subject started in response to immediate political and social events that I covered as a photojournalist.  After 10 years, I formalized it into a documentary project and continued it from that perspective.  In 2009, during what turned out to be the final destination in which I worked, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, I fully understood the deeper motivation for this work.  My parents were Holocaust refugees and my paternal grandparents were killed in a 1942 massacre in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia.  On the final day of this trip, I found my grandparents’ former home, and also found their names on a memorial plaque by the Danube River, dedicated to the massacre victims.

Marissa Roth

Project Name:

One Person Crying: Women and War

Project Type: Photography

Issue:
Women Directly Impacted by War

Mission:
To raise awareness and spark a dialogue around the less explored aspects of war’s destruction, by producing a traveling art exhibit, publishing a book, and creating a stage reading of testimonials.

Website:
marissarothphotography.com

CVF Involvement:

Creative Visions Foundation (CVF) provides One Person Crying with all membership benefits and business services, including fiscal sponsorship for One Person Crying. CVF hosted Marissa’s exhibit at the Dan Eldon Gallery. MENTOR connection: Diana Castle.

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