Kate Orne is working on some quite amazing and touching projects.
Although the pictures are pretty self explanatory, i’ll add a work statement by Kate Orne herself for those amongst you who like to read:
Over the past 7 years I have worked among the neediest people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and using photography as a tool to fight against indentured slavery and for the wellbeing of women, children and animals. My commitment to social causes has now become the defining part of my life as an artist and human being.
My portfolio is extensive and relies on a personal and quiet aesthetic to communicate visually — whether in documentary work or commercial photography. Intimacy has played and important part of my work.
Over the years I have worked on several essays ranging from indentured laborers in South East Asia where the poor are sentenced to lives of disease and want, victims of domestic abuse, orphanages in Kabul where thousands of children lack such basic things as bathroom facilities, maternity wards without the most basic care and imprisoned women committed to long sentences themselves being victims of rape and abuse.
Throughout, I have been documenting their struggles in photos — hoping to use art as a connection to wider awareness in the outside world. I have launched and managed a small organization of my own (now part of HAWCA.org) to aid Afghan refugee women and children.
During my recent journey to Pakistan in July 2007, I continued my work among the sex-workers and their families — re-encountering the daughters, barely teenagers, whom I knew as little girls just two years ago now introduced to the sex trade by their Mothers. At the same time, I have also seen the first anti-drug program and two little schools founded for the stigmatized children of the prostitutes, and joined in their efforts to improve the lives for the next generation.
I use this project I raise awareness about this little known community, and to raise funds for the two little schools, the first ones ever to offer education to the children of the sex-workers in this community with the mission to break the cycle of children being born into prostitution, sex abuse, drug addiction and crime. We currently have 80 students enrolled.
Kate Orne 2008
(no link to T'NK just yet)