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NY Home | Conservation Spotlight | Photovoice |
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Vegetables in a greenhouse
© Yang Wenying
Photographers from Remote Villages in China Visit New York for Museum Exhibition
Groundbreaking use of photographs by local people helps preserve land and culture.
Members of three ethnic minority groups from China’s Yunnan Province visited New York for 10 days in October to participate in events celebrating a landmark exhibition of their photographs that integrate nature, culture and conservation at the American Museum of Natural History. The three photographers—two men and one woman—belong to the Yi, Tibetan and Naxi cultures that inhabit China's eastern Himalayan mountains. The visitors are all participants in The Nature Conservancy’s Photovoice Project, an innovative conservation program that integrates photography, local people and traditional knowledge to help shape conservation decisions in their region -- one of the world's biodiversity hotspots.
Founded in 2000, the Photovoice Project has provided some 250 villagers with easy to use, point-and-shoot cameras and a roll of film each month for one year to document their rich environment, culture and ancestral protection of the land’s natural diversity. Monthly interviews with the photographers about the stories behind the pictures have produced valuable information that is helping shape effective conservation decisions. The Photovoice Project is an integral part of The Great Rivers Project, a joint effort between The Nature Conservancy and the Yunnan Provincial Government who are working together to establish nature reserves, protected areas and other conservation objectives in China’s northwest Yunnan Province, the most biologically diverse temperate region on earth.The photographers were accompanied to New York by a senior Chinese anthropologist, herself a member of the Naxi ethnic minority, who serves as an advisor to the Project.
A selection of 30 color photographs by the village photographers is currently on display at the Akley Gallery at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Voices from South of the Clouds will be on view through March 2006.
