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Page 1: Behind the Lens: Art and Identity for Cambodian-American Girls in SeattleBy Nathan Thornburgh in Seattle
Monday, November 26th, 2001
Thirteen girls between 12 and 16 years old bounce around the art studio on the first floor of the Seattle Art Museum taking pictures of each other with borrowed cameras and sitting at worktables to write out personal statements that will accompany the portraits.
It seems like a typical American after-school art program, but there is a key difference: the girls in this room are all children of refugees who fled the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. As such, the art they make reflects not only the dangers of growing up poor in Seattle's crime-ridden public housing projects, but also the difficulties of grappling with the echoes of a genocidal war two decades and half a world away.
The girls are members of an outreach program specifically for Cambodian girls called HERS (the name is short for the idyllic-sounding Helping Each Other Reach the Sky). On this day HERS has matched the girls with two local photographers, Shane Carpenter and Nancy Froehlich, and local writer Matt Rizzo in order to take pictures and write about themselves.
The portrait-taking project is timed to coincide with the museum's opening of an exhibition of pictures of women by renowned photographer Annie Liebowitz. Taking portraits of each other may seem like an easy task, but these girls, as Cambodian-American teenagers, often lead complicated lives in difficult circumstances.
Cambodians in Seattle, most of whom came to America as refugees in the 1980s, suffer first and foremost from economic problems. Because of the Khmer Rouge's brutal campaign against intellectuals, most of those who survived to make it to America two decades ago had rural backgrounds that fit poorly with the urban areas they settled.
Karrin Kallendar, a mental health specialist who works with the program, says that 90 percent of the parents of girls that the HERS program has worked with cannot speak English, while 85 percent are literate in only their own language.
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