FACES OF RESILIENCE
February - March
Peter Lippman’s photos from Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, Romania, and Bosnia span the last ten years, and
were taken in places where people have lived through all kinds of torment and injustice -- and have kept on struggling
for a better life, for the return of refugees, for recovery from trauma, and for protection of their environment.
How do people in those places cope with the tragedies and crimes that have befallen them? Most often, they
persist. They grow and live on, carving out a new space for a “normal” life.
People can be like grass growing through cracks in the pavement. In spite of adversity, they assert their rights.
Struggling against the legacy of war and impoverishment, rarely do the survivors give up. Rather, they move on
to the best of their ability. They seek justice. They create beauty around themselves and in themselves -- sometimes
just through the act of surviving. And sometimes they laugh.
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Peter Lippman is a native of Seattle and a long-time human rights activist. Over the past thirty years, he has spent
several years in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia, living there for two extended periods and returning some fifteen
times. He has also traveled to other parts of Eastern Europe as well as Latin America and the Middle East. For five
years in the late 1990s and early 2000s he worked for the Advocacy Project, researching and writing about
grassroots human rights campaigns.