DC—TEA AT THE BEACON. Reza’s next book, Kurdistan Renaissance, releases in France in March, he said, but mostly we talked about how he is expanding his photo camps from Syrian refugee children in Northern Iraq to other countries along with starting workshops for youth in violent urban neighborhoods.
The famed photographer and humanitarian was in town for the annual National Geographic Photographers’ Seminar and has remained to shoot the marches and inauguration.
He and I will just miss each other in Buenos Aires at the end of the month. Reza is flying there from his home in Paris to work out more details about a workshop in the barrio that Porteños call “Ft. Apache.” By then, regretfully!!!, I’ll be in Uruguay and will miss my ambition to observe him in action with children.
I first met Reza in 1991. My publication, “National Geographic Insider,” ran a story about what happened after the magazine ran Reza’s shot of a legless beggar boy in Cairo being whipped by his master.
Members sent thousands of dollars to help the 10-year-old. Reza and his brother, Mansour, also a photographer, tracked down the boy in a city teeming with beggars and organized his family to open a small business so they all could be employed.
Reza went on to shoot many wars and many articles in extremely dicey places. At the same time, he and his wife, Rachel, stepped up their defense of children, first in campaigns against land mines. During the Rwandan genocide, 10,000 “orphaned” youth were scattered in many refugee camps while thousands of parents grieved for their lost children. Reza organized a system of portraits and identification that reunited about 4,000 of the children with their families.
In November 2015, Reza was on the National Geographic tour that I took to Israel and the West Bank. When we talked about his Syrian photo camps, I started to solicit old cameras from the well-equipped on our tour. Reza stopped me and explained to us that these children felt discarded, so it was essential for them to have new, professional equipment, not castoff cameras that no one wanted. The first lesson is built around slicing open the plastic wrapper, lifting the lid and taking out their own, $1,000 camera. Since all cameras are alike, the instruction is simplified.
Reza had been supporting these camps from his own savings. I probably was not the only one on our tour who chipped in to help.
Plans in Buenos Aires call for the Ft. Apache photos to be exhibited next November, when the towering jacaranda turn the city into a spring extravaganza of lavender. I’m very curious where the photos will be exhibited. Reza accomplishes miracles — giant blow-ups of his Syrian’s students work have lined a promenade along the Seine for the past few summers.
BTW: Reza, an Iranian exile who was jailed by both the Shah’s police and the Ayatollah’s, heard the news about the bombings in Paris when our tour was by the Galilee. At breakfast that morning, he told us his wife and daughter had walked by the cafe in their neighborhood just two and a half minutes before gunmen opened fire. At least two of his friends died. “The front lines have come home,” he said, and left for Paris for the night with his family and then on to Iraq to join the Peshmerga who had started an offensive.
