Where Children Sleep
4-year-old Romanian boy who shares a mattress with his family in the outskirts of Rome, Italy.
From the mind of James Mollison comes a remarkable series capturing the diversity of and, often, disparity between children’s lives around the world through portraits of their bedrooms.
Alongside portraits of the children themselves. Each pair of photographs is accompanied by an extended caption that tells the story of each child: Kaya in Tokyo, whose proud mother spends $1,000 a month on her dresses; Bilal the Bedouin shepherd boy, who sleeps outdoors with his father’s herd of goats; the Nepali girl Indira, who has worked in a granite quarry since she was three; and Ankhohxet, the Kraho boy who sleeps on the floor of a hut deep in the Amazon jungle.
Where Children Sleep began on a brief journey to engage with children’s rights and morphed into a thoughtful meditation on poverty and privilege, its 56 images spanning from the stone quarries of Nepal to the farming provinces of China to the silver spoons of Fifth Avenue.
High resolution pictures can be found here.
9-year-old Jamie shares a top-floor apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue with his parents and three siblings. The family's two other homes are in Spain and the Hamptons.
14-year-old Erien slept on the floor of her favela abode in Rio de Janeiro until the late stages of her pregnancy.
11-year-old Joey, who killed his first deer when he was seven, lives in Kentucky with his family.
12-year-old Lamine sleeps in a room shared with several other boys in the Koranic school in their Senegalese village.
9-year-old Tsvika and his siblings share a bedroom in an apartment in the West Bank, in a gated Orthodox Jewish community known as Beitar Illit.
4-year-old Jasmine has participated in over 100 child beauty pageants and lives in a large house in the Kentucky countryside.
14-year-old Prena is a domestic worker in Nepal and lives in a cell-like room in the attic of the house where she works in Katmandu.
8-year old Harrison has everything his Harvard educated parents can provide, including a big screen TV, en suite bathroom and playroom. He attends a private school where hitting and teasing other kids and negative energy is banned.
6-year old Bilal is a Bedouin who lives with his parents and five brothers and sister in the West Bank. Their last house was bulldozed by the Israeli military.
Alyssa lives in a small wooden house with her family in Appalachia.
[Cheers brainpickings.org]
You may also enjoy these Helablog posts
Go the Fuck to Sleep Dammit – Just for Kids
Nothing cuter than a bunch ferocious tigers sleeping next to an innocent child – I think she may be dead already. For parents in the ‘real’ world this book is going to be my def...
That is not your Mommy Anymore – A Zombie Tale for Kids
What kid doesn’t like a good zombie story right before bed? Matt Mogk, founder of the Zombie Research Society, wrote a riveting children's book called That's Not Your Mommy A...
Haunting Homeless Faces
A chance meeting with a young homeless girl in the streets of London changed photographer Lee Jeffries artistic approach forever. Jeffries had stolen a photo from this young ...
From Around the Web
126 Responses to Where Children Sleep
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
It saddens me that people in the outside world know nothing about Kentucky. I lived in the poverty belt of eastern KY until last year. It's not the American Dream, people. Poverty, hunger, homelessness — it's a common place right in your backyards. Sometimes I want nothing more than to talk to people about what it's really like back home.