ME:Photo Exhibit Chronicles Somalis' Journey to U.S.

Exhibit chronicles Somalis' journey to U.S.
Saturday, December 27, 2008 PHOTO GALLERY

LEWISTON - "The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away," a touring exhibition of photographs chronicling the migration of Somali refugees to Maine and other U.S. locations, will open at Bates College with events beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23, in the Olin Arts Center.

The 55 black-and-white images created by Somali-born photographer Abdi Roble will be exhibited at the Bates College Museum of Art through May 29. The show opens with a 5 p.m. lecture about the U.S. intervention in Somalia, followed by Roble and his collaborator in a book project speaking at 6 p.m. Both events take place in Olin's Room 104. A reception in the museum follows at 7 p.m.

Museum admission is free. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, but is closed on major holidays. For more information, call 786-6158 or log on to www.bates.edu/museum.

Since the early 1990s, civil violence has forced hundreds of thousands of Somalis out of that African nation. Roble, who left Somalia in 1989 and now lives in Ohio, has documented the Somali diaspora for five years.

His images trace the refugees' long hard journey from refugee camps in Kenya to such cities as Minneapolis Columbus, Ohio and Portland, Maine. One group of photographs tracks a single family's journey from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to California, and their subsequent resettlement in Maine.

Michael Paulovich, a retired Marine Corps colonel who served in Somalia with a diplomatic security team during the U.S. presence there in the early 1990s, offers the lecture "Challenges in Humanitarian Intervention: Cultural Lessons from Somalia 1992-1994" at 5 p.m. Jan. 23. For more information, visit www.bates.edu/x187700.xml.

Paulovich will be followed at 6 p.m. by Roble and writer Doug Rutledge, discussing their collaboration on the book "The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away," based on the images Roble is showing at Bates.

In a 2007 Associated Press article, Roble explained the importance of capturing the refugees' experiences while they were happening. "If you have no record, you have no history," he said. "We lost everything. We have no museum, no galleries, no record."

In photographing the refugees, Roble told the AP, he found himself humbled by the stories he witnessed. The images represent "classic American stories of people landing in this country. It's exactly the same, it just happened in a different time."

Roble was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1964 and came to the United States in 1989. He has freelanced for the Columbus Dispatch and the Columbus Post, and his images have appeared in Leica View magazine.

In 2003, with Rutledge and others, Roble founded the Somali Documentary Project, with the goal of photographically documenting members of the Somali diaspora while they are still engaging in the cultural practices of their homeland. For more information, see www.somaliproject.org.

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