That all changed when Kristine, whose color-saturated photos are set to go on world tour this year, met an abolitionist while exhibiting her work at the 2009 Vancouver Peace Summit. The advocate told Kristine that 27 million people are enslaved worldwide – more than twice the estimated number of people taken from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries.

“I almost fell over,” said Kristine, whose images hang in the Palace of Bhutan, have been auctioned at Christie’s to benefit the United Nations, and have drawn accolades from the Dalai Lama. “It blew me away that I, whose whole job is to see, didn’t know.”

Within a week, she was in the Los Angeles offices of the advocacy group Free the Slaves, offering to use her 19th century, 4-by-5 camera to expose slavery: the impoverished children and adults given false promises of money, education and a better life, only to be tricked into indentured labor and held in captivity by fear, force and coercion.

Illegal mine

In Ghana, Kristine climbed 200 feet down an illegal gold-mine shaft to find men with crude flashlights tied to their heads, forced to endure dust and dark for 72-hour stretches.

Escorted by local representatives from Free the Slaves, she found children in the Himalayas lugging slabs of slate heavier than themselves down the mountains, via crude harnesses attached to their foreheads made from sticks, rope and torn cloth.

At a brick kiln in Nepal, she photographed workers in 130-degree heat and choking dust, stacking 18 bricks on their head at a time and walking the loads to waiting trucks.

“All I could see was Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ ” Kristine said.

She saw trafficked children in tattered shirts reeling in 1,000-pound fishing nets on the shore of Lake Volta in Ghana, freezing in the early dawn after all-night fishing expeditions.

Avoiding patrolmen with automatic weapons, she quickly snapped off a few shots with her 35mm camera of men, women and children panning for gold in huge, watery pits contaminated by mercury in Ghana.

‘No end in sight’

“These slaves are in plain sight, some are hidden deep in the jungles – some of them don’t even understand they are enslaved because they have been laboring all their lives – with no pay, and with no end in sight,” Kristine said.

The images she brought back stunned the world, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who wrote in the preface to her 2010 book, “Slavery”:

“On behalf of God, (I have a hotline), thank you for all the people you are going to liberate and thank you for all the rest of us who will be truly free only when those in bondage are finally free.”

After visiting her Sonoma gallery, a young girl started a lemonade stand to fight slavery, and collected money for Free the Slaves, Kristine said.

Soon, her slavery images will embark on a multiyear, world exhibition, “Enslaved,” in conjunction with several nongovernmental organizations, including Voices for Freedom and Free the Slaves. (The tour locations have not been revealed yet.)

A film in production about a Nepalese girl trafficked to India includes a character based on Kristine, played by Gillian Anderson.

Kristine is often asked whether any of the people she photographed has been set free.

“Kofi,” she says.

She photographed Kofi taking a bath at a rescue center for trafficked children in Ghana after he had been forced into fishing. After his photo was taken, he was reunited with his family, and abolitionists taught his parents to turn away traffickers who come knocking with false promises of good jobs for their children.

False promises

Such promises are also made in this country, Kristine said, describing what she found in shopping malls in Washington, D.C., where affable men approach young girls and sweep them off their feet – and right into the sex trade.

“That’s why I won’t ever let my children hang out at the mall,” said Kristine, who along with her partner has adopted a son, 6, from Guatemala, and a daughter, 4, from Ethiopia.

In addition to her global slavery exhibit, Kristine also has a new book coming out, “Bhutan – Repository of the Spirit,” with a forward by the Queen Mother of Bhutan, Tshering Yangdon. She has a flight booked to India this month to document a gathering of neuroscientists and 10,000 monks interested in studying the effects of contemplation and compassion on the brain.

It’s a subject close to Kristine’s heart. The day after she graduated from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in San Francisco, the city native spent the next five years photographing and meditating in Europe and Asia.

“I photographed every day. I did tai chi. I spent 30 days in silence, the last 1o in a cave – a lot of sitting on pillows to ultimately confront myself,” she said.

And the trip left her with a four-word mantra: “I am a photographer.”

“I would do this anyway, even if nobody paid me for it. It’s just worked out that photography has been very gracious to me.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Lisa-Kristine-photographs-slavery-4167748.php#ixzz2H8o7xzgy

This week on National Geographic Weekend, join host Boyd Matson speaking with Lisa Kristine. It may be shocking to many Americans that the Civil War did not, in fact, totally stamp out human slavery in the United States. Photographer and human trafficking activist Lisa Kristine went to many places to see humans forced into various types of labor under the threat of violence. She tells Boyd about sex trafficking in Asia and the United States, as well as fishermen in Ghana’s Lake Volta.

There are 27 million slaves in the world today – that’s more than double the number of people taken from Africa during the entire transatlantic slave trade. Lisa Kristine, a U.S.-based photographer, has documented modern-day slavery in more than 100 countries on six continents for the last 28 years. Listen to Lisa as she tells us more about slavery today.

Published date: 12/12/2012

It was 130 degrees when I was first introduced to the brick kilns of Nepal. In these severe temperatures, men, women, and children — whole families, in fact — were surrounded by a dense cloud of dust while mechanically stacking bricks on their heads, carrying them, 18 at a time, from the scorching kilns to trucks hundreds of yards away.

These are slaves. Deadened by monotony and exhaustion, they worked without speaking, repeating the same task 16 hours a day. They took no rest for food or water, no bathroom breaks — although their dehydration suppressed their need to urinate.

Around the world human traffickers trick many people into slavery by false promises of good jobs or good education, only to find themselves forced to work without pay, under the threat of violence. Trapped by phony debt, these slaves are hunted by local police and private security guards if they try to escape. Sometimes slaves don’t even understand that they’re enslaved, despite people working 16 or 17 hours a day with no pay. They’re simply used to it as something they’ve been doing their whole lives. Their bodies grow weak and vulnerable to disease, but they have nothing to compare their experience to.

For the last 28 years I have documented people in more than 100 countries on six continents. In 2009, at the Vancouver Peace Summit, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern-day slavery; weeks later, I flew down to Los Angeles and met with the director of Free the Slaves; thus began my journey into exploring modern-day slavery.

Oddly, I’d been to most of the locations where I started photographing slavery many times before. I even considered some of them homes-away-from-home. But there can be dark corners in familiar places.

These are not images of “problems.” They’re images of people. There are 27 million slaves in the world today: That’s more than double the number of people taken from Africa during the entire transatlantic slave trade. A hundred and fifty years ago, an average agricultural slave cost over three times the average yearly wage of an American worker, about US$50,000 in today’s money. Yet now, entire families can be enslaved for generations over a debt as small as $18. Slavery is illegal everywhere, but it exists all over the world.

Accra, Ghana: These gold miners have just come out of the shaft, their pants soaked from their own sweat. Most had spent all their money coming from the north hoping to strike it rich in legal mines. But legal operations require certifications. When they can’t get a job, the men take high-interest loans or join groups of slaves in mines abandoned by legitimate operations.

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About TEDx, x = independently organized event

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

Acclaimed humanitarian photographer Lisa Kristine specializes in images of remote indigenous peoples. Best known for her evocative and saturated use of color, her fine art prints are among the most sought after and collected in the world. Kristine has documented in over 70 countries on six continents.

Lisa Kristine was born in San Francisco, California, on September 2, 1965. She developed an early interest in anthropology and photography. Kristine was mentored in her youth in Silver Gelatin and Cibachrome printing. Following graduation from the FIDM in San Francisco, Kristine photographed for nearly five years in Europe and Asia.

Lisa Kristine has collaborated with international humanitarian organizations. When the State of the World Forum convened in San Francisco in 1999 and New York in 2000, Kristine was asked to present her work to help inspire discussions on human rights, social change, and global security. Her work was auctioned by Christie’s New York to benefit the United Nations with Kofi Annan. She was also honored to be the sole exhibitor at the 2009 Vancouver Peace Summit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Reverend Tutu and award winning Nobel Laureates. She partnered with Free the Slaves in 2010 to do a photographic body of work on Modern Day Slavery.

Her work is made distinctive by her passion, intuition and her intense interest in the humanity of her subjects. Lisa Kristine’s art is her personal statement about the connection of humanity, and about the diversity, beauty, and hardship of our world.

Lisa Kristine resides in Northern California with her family.

Having traveled both high and low in nearly 100 countries, Kristine landed at Moraga’s Saint Mary’s College in late January to deliver the final lecture in the school’s “Inspired” 2013 Jan Term Speaker Series.

On the screen, the black-and-white image of a young boy clutching a ragged cloth to his head appeared. In his eyes, the cloth’s same, worn texture. His body is perhaps ten-years old; his suffering, that of centuries.

“One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language,” the Marin County-based Kristine said.

Next, a tattooed boy, touching his forehead to the trunk of an elephant. Both he and the animal are submerged to their waists in river water. It is a communion.

Words float on the screen: “Images are more than art. They are knowledge.”

Kristine began documenting indigenous cultures, making images of dignity amid modern-day slavery, after being slugged in the belly by the “freight train” realization that slavery is not past — it is present.

“How could I, someone who sees, not have known?” she asked, rhetorically, during a preshow interview. “Now, I see atrocities occurring everywhere.”

The sights — captured gloriously and

horrifyingly in her books, posters and prints — strip pretense, but never promise, from the dignified people and places she visits.

“When I leave this country, I’m not traveling as a female or American. I am someone who wants to connect. I arrive as a human being,” she explained.

Perhaps for that reason alone, she is frequently allowed access to places that are off-limits to other photographers.

“I bring a sense of awe. Even if they’re enslaved, they are intrinsically the same as I am. My work is about the establishment of trust. For someone to share their authenticity with me is a soul-to-soul thing. It’s not a lens-to-soul thing.”

But the images argue her point. For certainly, the Nikkor lens she places on her 19th century K.B. Canham field view camera saw into the heart of the godlike Nepalese kiln worker, rising in a cloud of lethal, orange dust with 50 pounds of bricks on his head.

And the digital 35 mm model she uses when a project demands agility and that she “run like hell” if she has to, burrows beyond surfaces to reveal unforgettable, wisdom-born-of-grief profiles in Ghana, India, Washington D.C.

The pictures filling her most recent book release, “The Intimate Expanse,” show her preference for searing reds, soaring blues and burnished gold tones, often made even more breathtaking by their monochromatic settings.

Two documentaries, with another on slavery in production, explain her mission.

“I pose the question, ‘What if, instead of responding to differences with fear, we respond with curiosity?’ ” she said.

Kristine has aligned her inquisitive crosshairs with the nongovernmental group Free the Slaves, whose mission she said is to eradicate slavery in our lifetime.

With her 2010 book “Slavery” and in lectures she gives worldwide, she aims to burn a hole in slave fables.

“Exactly the way you think about slavery in your worst nightmare — that’s what it’s like,” she told the students, faculty and photography-admiring audience.

After traveling through an inferno-like journey of kilns, mines, textile factories and sex-trafficking cubicles, audience questions centered on safety and accountability.

Kristine always partners with reputable international organizations and native abolitionists. Her translators are individually selected through interviews she conducts upon arriving in each country. Her guides are guardians, as much as hosts.

“Sometimes, they bring me in when the slave holders are gone. I only have 10 minutes and we have hand signals to know when I need to high-tail it out of there,” she said. “It’s in hindsight that I experience fear. When I’m out there, I’m so angry, it keeps me away from my fear.”

Read the full article here »

Lisa Kristine – Humanitarian Photographer from Spirituality & Health on Vimeo.