The Housing is a Human Right Project

Housing is a Human Right is an ongoing multi-platform documentary portrait of the struggle for home. The project creates a space for people to record stories, in their own words, of home, community and efforts to maintain or obtain housing. Composed of stories in sound and photographs, in the tradition of oral history, along with testimonies and memories – woven and remixed – this collection of viscerally honest, first-person narratives aims to illuminate the complex fabric of community and the human right to a place to call home. 

Down And Outs Of Howrah

Soham Gupta has been producing a photo-essay on a group of down-and-outs who live near the world famous Howrah Railway Station, in West Bengal. Most of them have taken to drugs and many of them have developed mental disorders and even HIV over the course of their life. 

Unicef Photo Of The Year 2010

The winners of this year's Unicef Photo of the Year contest have been announced in Berlin. The prize is awarded to outstanding photos that best depict the personality and living conditions of children.

Approximately 4 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan and Iran and are now trying to settle down again in their home country. Among these refugees was the family of eight-year-old Akram shown in the image above by Majid Saeedi. His family had looked for shelter in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and Akram tried to make money by collecting scraps on a rubbish dump in the city. While rummaging through the rubbish, he accidentally touched a non-insulated cable, which caused severe burns. Both his hands and arms had to be amputated. Akram’s family have now returned to Kabul and he received arm prostheses thanks to the help of the International Red Cross

DR Congo: The Forgotten War

Ron Haviv's look at life in Eastern Congo and the work of Doctors Without Borders' attempt to make a difference.

The Disappeared In Nepal

Amnesty International has launched a new multi-media piece for the International Day of the Disappeared (30 August) that looks at impunity for conflict related abuses in Nepal.  Working with Purnimaya Lama (whose husband was abducted and killed by members of the Communist Party of Nepal), and local photographer Nayan Tara Gurung Kakshapati, the piece tells a story of what it is like to be left behind, uncertain of what the future holds.

Land Of 10,000 Homeless

Every day, approximately 10,000 people in Minnesota will sleep outside or in temporary shelter. This video allows us a chance to see the world from their eyes. For more information, please visit www.voicesofthestreets.org.

White Poverty In South Africa

Seeking to reverse decades of racial inequality, South Africa’s ruling ANC government introduced affirmative action laws that promote employment for blacks and aim to give black South Africans a bigger slice of the economy. This shift in racial hiring practices coupled with the fallout from the global financial crisis means many poor white South Africans have fallen on hard times.

Poverty, And Little Sympathy, In South Africa

If there was one thing Finbarr O’Reilly sought to emphasize when he began reporting on white poverty in South Africa, it was that color shouldn’t have a voice in the conversation.

“It doesn’t really matter what color it is,” said Mr. O’Reilly, a 39-year-old Canadian photographer for Reuters whose touching 2005 photo of a Niger mother and child was named World Press Photo of the Year. “It’s an issue that really is quite urgent right now in South Africa.”

The story has rarely been told. But it has been on his radar since a 1994 backpacking trip through Africa, when he noticed a number of poor white South Africans begging for change at traffic lights.

“I started asking around and saying, ‘What’s going on here?’” Mr. O’Reilly said over the phone from Dakar, Senegal, where he’s based. “It’s not a new phenomenon, but the numbers seem to be more apparent than they were in the past.”

Read the rest of the story by Kerri McDonald and view images by Finbar O'Reilly here.

Bangladesh: Terrifying Normalcy

Photojournalist Ron Haviv traveled to the island of Bhola in southern Bangladesh to document the challenges of food insecurity, rapid climate change and poverty which make malnutrition so pervasive on this densely-populated island. In his intimate portraits, Haviv captures the resignation with which Bhola's malnourished mothers and children accept a chronically meager food supply. 

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and VII Photo present Starved for Attention, a multimedia campaign to uncover the hidden crisis of childhood malnutrition. Watch 7 of the 195 million stories of malnutrition from prolific and award-winning photojournalists.

Sign the "Starved for Attention" online petition and be part of the campaign to rewrite the story of malnutrition and demand that the 195 million malnourished children get the attention they need and deserve to escape the deadly cycle of malnutrition.

South Africa AIDS Orphans: A foster Mother Can't Cope

Like many shouldering the burden of South Africa AIDS orphans, foster mother Olga Thimbela tearfully wonders if her goodwill in adding six extended family members to three children of her own was a mistake. Watch the slideshow by Melanie Stetson Freeman here.

The New American Diaspora

Photographer, Kadir van Lohuizen has been documenting the lives of two families displaced from Hurricane Katrina to Houston, Texas. The images are a powerful testament to perseverance these two families poses as they continue to piece their lives back together five years after the storm.

"Those who fell through the cracks" is a traveling street exhibition. Learn more about the exhibit.

Wilmington, Delaware

A sobering multimedia expose on the economic meltdown of an all-American city.  Photos and video by John Moore, produced by Getty Images.

Understanding Doug Latz

Both misunderstood and widely recognized in Athens County, 48-year-old Doug Latz doesn't let his developmental disability keep him from the roads and bike paths of his world.

Gimme Shelter

Along the Los Angeles River are invisible cities whose population centers do not figure on official maps. The river's littered banks have become a no-man's land for the homeless the hardcore junkies, the mentally ill and those just trying  to disappear. A dozen or so people live in tents and lean-tos under the  7th Street bridge in Long Beach, just one of the many invisible villages along the river.

Click here to view the audio slideshow "Gimme Shelter" produced for the Los Angeles Times by Marc Martin. Photography and audio by Francine Orr.

Close To Home

Roxanne Pickering, a mother of four, lives with her husband and six year-old daughter in a small Brooklyn apartment. Crippled in a motorcycle accident 13 years earlier, Pickering found new reason to live with the birth of her youngest child. She is a doting and vigilant mother.

Betty Lester is a 40-year resident of the neighborhood, living in the nearby Gowanus apartment blocks. She is a neighborhood activist and, for years, has tried to bring attention to the Gowanus Canal, for which the neighborhood is named. The Gowanus Canal is bounded by several communities including Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook. The canal empties into New York Harbor. Completed in 1869, the Gowanus Canal was once a major transportation route for the then separate cities of Brooklyn and New York City. Manufactured gas plants, mills, tanneries, and chemical plants are among the many facilities that operated along the canal.

As a result of years of discharges, storm water runoff, sewer outflows and industrial pollutants, the Gowanus Canal has become one of the nation's most extensively contaminated water bodies. Contaminants include PCBs, coal tar wastes, heavy metals and volatile organics. The contamination poses a threat to the nearby residents who use the canal for fishing and recreation.

Photography and video by Mary Beth Meehan and Michele Asselin.

Liberia Tortoise Community

VII Network photographer, Stefano De Luigi, recently spent time documenting the rebuilding of war survivors' lives in Tortoise community, Monrovia, Liberia.  Read the story and view the images here. 

A Place To Call Home

A Place to Call Home: Families Struggling with Homelessness is an independent project focused on families in need and the issues surrounding homelessness in Louisville, KY.  Click here to view a slideshow of images from the project.

Housing Is A Human Right

Homeless-led organization Picture the Homeless rally outside JP Morgan Chase headquarters in Manhattan.  Read more at Housing is a Human Right.

Take A Picture, Tell A Story

“I'll take your photo, you tell me a story” sums up the idea behind Robert Gumpert's compelling collection of still images with audio.  You can access the project here.