Internationally renowned American documentary photographer Greg Constantine will be in Penticton this weekend to discuss his powerful photographic essay about some of the world’s most oppressed people – Myanmar’s Rohingya.

Constantine’s current exhibition Exiled To Nowhere: Burman’s Rohingya is on display at the Penticton Art Gallery (PAG) and local residents are invited to listen to Constantine talk about his exhibit and experience in documenting the plight of the Rohingya people on Saturday at 1 p.m. at PAG.

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority from the Rakhine State in Western Myanmar, (Burma). Though the Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for several hundred years, successive Burmese governments and local Buddhist groups have refused to recognize the Rohingya, unjustly claiming they are not indigenous to Burma, said Constantine.

For over 50 years, the Rohingya have endured systematic human rights abuse and nearly one million were made stateless when the Burmese government enacted the 1982 Citizenship Act, which recognized only 135 ethnic groups as being citizens of Myanmar, of which the Rohingya were intentionally not included, he said.

Photo Credit: Facebook Greg ConstantineAcclaimed American photographer Greg Constantine will be heading a discussion about his exhibit called Exile to Nowhere: Burma's Rohingya on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Penticton Art Gallery. Constantine has been photographing one of the world's most oppressed ethnic minorities for the past 13 years.

Since then, the Rohingya have been one of the largest stateless communities in the world, he said.

“I started photographing the Rohingya in early 2006 and since then, I’ve pretty much consistently been documenting the challenges they’ve faced over the past 13 years,” said Constantine, in a phone interview from Montana, where he and his wife were located while driving towards Penticton earlier this week.

He’s spent the past 12 years documenting the plight of the Rohingya through his photographs.

“It really grew into something much bigger … it turned from just reporting on a situation that was always changing to really feeling like I was chronicling something over a long, sustained period of time that nobody had really tried to attempt to do before,” he said. “I quickly gained this really deep responsibility to continue photographing this community.”

Photo Credit: ContributedThis is one of the 50 photographs in the Exile to Nowhere: Burma's Rohingya on display at the Penticton Art Gallery. Photographer Greg Constantine will talk about his exhibit Saturday at 1 p.m. and all local residents are invited to attend.

Constantine said he visited Burma four times to photograph Rohingya, but he was banned and blacklisted by the Burmese government in late 2016 and hasn’t returned.

Constantine grew up in the United States, but has dual citizenship as he’s called Bangkok, Thailand his main home for the past 13 years.

His show at the PAG features more than 50 of his best photographs of Rohingya citizens he’s met over the years, he said.

“What I’ve really tried to show is this legacy of persecution these people have been subjected to over the past 13 years,” he said. “One of the reasons I’ve been so dedicated to the Rohingya all these years is that it really is one of the most extreme situations of human rights abuse in the world today.

“Also, it’s representative of the over-arching power of the state to try and erase an entire community from the fabric of society. Also, at the same time, the work is presented in a way that it challenges people really re-think what genocide is because what’s going on over there is a genocide happening with this particular community.”

Photo Credit: NowMedia

What’s happening with the Rohingya doesn’t include “mass slaughter” like historic genocide in the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosnia over the past decades, but these people are being systematically eliminated by the tens of thousands with each passing year, said Constantine.

“What’s happened to this community is over the past 30 or 40 years, so much has been done to reduce the Rohingya down to basically nothing,” he said. “In a way, this community, including last year, has been eradicated from the place they call home in Burma.”

He believes he has a duty as a socially-conscious photographer to tell the story of this community as well as he can, said Constantine.

Photo Credit: NowMedia

“It’s not only my responsibility to produce the pictures and images, but it’s also a huge responsibility to ensure the work engages people,” he said. “I just really feel honoured to have the work shown at such a socially-conscious gallery such as Penticton Art Gallery.

“I’m really looking forward to have the community in Penticton exposed to this story in a powerful way through my photographs.”

Constantine met PAG director-curator Paul Crawford earlier this year during a four-month run at the Salt Spring Island Art Gallery an Artist in Residence.

He met Crawford, who was attending at an art exhibition on Salt Spring Island.

“We talked about my work … everything worked out and I’m just really happy to be part of this show in Penticton,” he said.

Constantine said his presentation Saturday will “talk a little bit more in depth about the work, the motivation behind it and stories behind the pictures. Just kind add a little more context in my own personal experience into the exhibition for the people in attendance.”

Constantine is currently an ISRF Fellow with the Independent Social Research Foundation in the U.K. and is using his fellowship to continue his visual documentation of the plight of and genocide committed against the Rohingya community.

Photo Credit: NowMedia

Besides his work in Myanmar, Constantine has spent the past 12 years (2005-2017) working on the project Nowhere People, which documented the lives and struggles of stateless communities in 19 countries around the world.

He is the author of three books, including Kenya’s Nubians: Then & Now (2011) and Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya (2012), which was named a 2012 Notable Photo Book of the Year by the Independent on Sunday in the U.K. and Photo District News Magazine (PDN) in the U.S..

Photo Credit: Facebook Greg Constantine

His third book, Nowhere People, was named a 2015 Notable Photo Book of the Year by the editors of Photo District News Magazine and was recognized as one of the Top Ten Photo Books of 2015 by Mother Jones Magazine in the U.S.

His work has been featured in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Newsweek, South China Morning Post, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, The Telegraph Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, Internazionale, CNN, and Al Jazeera.

You can also learn more about Constantine by going to his website at www.nowherepeople.org

For more on the Penticton Art Gallery, click here.