ADA TRILLO: Born and raised in the U.S./ Mexican border region of Juarez and El Paso, Ada Trillo is a first-generation Mexican-American photographer. Currently based on the East Coast, Trillo’s photographic work focuses on human displacement, socioeconomic and humanitarian crises, and the profound social, political, and cultural transformations that show how poverty, gender, and structural exclusion and inequality have a particular incidence among women and children.
Her photographs have been featured in international publications, including The Guardian, Vogue, Smithsonian Magazine, and
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ADA TRILLO: Born and raised in the U.S./ Mexican border region of Juarez and El Paso, Ada Trillo is a first-generation Mexican-American photographer. Currently based on the East Coast, Trillo’s photographic work focuses on human displacement, socioeconomic and humanitarian crises, and the profound social, political, and cultural transformations that show how poverty, gender, and structural exclusion and inequality have a particular incidence among women and children.
Her photographs have been featured in international publications, including The Guardian, Vogue, Smithsonian Magazine, and Mother Jones. Trillo’s work is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other institutional and private collections.
Awards include The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Fellowship (2022), The Eddie Adams Workshop Canon Award (2022), The British Journal of Photography Female In Focus Best Series Award (2020), and The Me & Eve Grant from the Center of Photographic Arts in Santa Fe (2020).
Trillo’s first monograph, La Caravana Del Diablo: On the Run from the Northern Triangle to America was published by Komma (Netherlands, 2021). The book chronicles seven years of traveling with refugees and migrants from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Her photographs have been included in solo and group exhibits in the United States, Japan, Luxembourg, Italy, England, France, and Germany. Trillo holds degrees from the Istituto Marangoni in Milan, Drexel University in Philadelphia, and the International Center of Photography in New York, with a concentration in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism.
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SIRKHANE DARKROOM: The Syrian photographer Serbest Salih had just finished university, in 2014, when the Islamic State laid siege to his home town of Kobani. He fled to the Turkish province of Mardin, just over the border, where tens of thousands of Syrian refugees have settled during the past decade’s civil war. A multiethnic conflict zone at the edge of Mesopotamia, Mardin is home to a community center called the Sirkhane Social Circus School. Under the tutelage of volunteer instructors there, children affected by war learn to juggle, spin plates, and walk on stilts.
In 2017, Salih started a photography workshop at Sirkhane, teaching students to shoot and print their own analog photographs. A few years later, he began leading the workshop from a mobile darkroom in a secondhand caravan, packing up his materials every month to drive to a different village and a new group of kids. “When I show the children how to develop their photos, I am always awe-struck by their reactions,” he writes, in “I Saw the Air Fly,” a new collection of the children’s photography, from Mack Books. “Many of them really believe at first that it’s a type of magic.”
Salih’s students include local Turks and Kurds as well as displaced natives of Syria and Iraq. One aim of the workshop is to improve neighborhood relations, uniting children from communities that might otherwise remain isolated owing to linguistic and cultural barriers
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