Lenses on Survival

A shantytown built in 1960′s Phnom Penh, that slumps towards dilapidation and bustles with poverty and prostitution.

A banana plantation worker, face creased beyond his years after a lifetime guiding Cambodian migrants–desperate for work–through fields of landmines near the Thai border.

A young activist, whose virginity was once sold for a meager $300, wandering the slums to teach little girls how to speak up for themselves.

These are the subjects that Seattle-based photographer Tim Matsui captures with poignant clarity in his work on human trafficking.  Matsui, who early on in his career founded an NGO that promotes documentary multimedia as a means of creating dialogue about sexual violence, is more than a storyteller.  His deft integration of images, audio, and video prove his digital craftsmanship, but Matsui’s aims for his work are further-reaching.  He hopes that his stories will elicit more than an emotional response from his audiences, inspiring people to step up to the plate of social transformation and connect with the humanity of his subjects.  It’s a connection he’s devoted his life to nurturing.

I talked to him in Brooklyn, where he worked with MediaStorm.

Human Goods:  From looking at your photos it’s obvious that you’ve been around. How did you get involved in human trafficking issues?

Tim Matsui:  I remember some early media pieces on MSNBC.  They were on the NATO campaign in Kosovo — the bombing and the subsequent peacekeeping mission — and with those peacekeepers came a demand for sex services, which meant there was a market for the trafficking of Eastern European women.  I remember seeing that in the mid-90’s and thinking, I wish I could do something about this or know more about it or report on it.

When friends of mine moved to Thailand for two years, I went to visit them.  Not knowing much about human trafficking but knowing it was an issue in Southeast Asia, I began doing some research on Thailand and stayed on my friend’s couch.  I spent one week at the border with Burma and one week in Phnom Penh, Cambodia working with Somaly Mam’s organization, and saw that things are much more raw in Cambodia.

AFESIP President Somaly Mam with girls rescued from sex trafficking

I went back on the invitation of  an NGO that deals with victim aftercare.  It gave me an opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at victim aftercare and a national effort supported by foreign aid to develop a leading anti-trafficking effort in Cambodia.  That was all focused on sex trafficking, and labor is larger.

HG: What did you learn about labor trafficking?

TM: The work really opened my eyes up to the labor component which the U.S. and the media and faith-based organizations generally don’t address.  Many think it’s just an issue with the farm workers or the poor migrants coming up from South America—but it’s not.  And people don’t know what they’re looking at. They don’t understand what they’re seeing. They’re not even aware of it in the first place, and they’re too focused on the sex element (which is horrible).

In Southeast Asia I started looking at migration into Thailand for jobs.  Human trafficking, I believe, is a symptom of greater social and economic ills, and I think anybody who’s done work on human trafficking will be able to say—yeah, it’s healthcare, yeah it’s education, yeah it’s poverty.  It’s a lack of economic opportunity that drives people into vulnerable situations.

Prostitute Srey Leat holds a baby at home in a slum where the non governmental organization “Acting for Women in Distressing Situations” (AFESIP), conducts outreach and provides services in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The permanent structure, a decaying four story building known simply as ‘The Building’, was built in the 1960′s as transitional housing and now hosts a shantytown where many of the city’s poor live, including many prostitutes, and is believed to have the highest rate of HIV infection in the city.

HG:  So how do you capture such a reality in media, and do it with compassion?

TM: I try to find ways to address that in the media that’s  emotive and true—true to journalistic mores and ethics—but is informative and not just shocking.  If you look at the pictures from Haiti that came in, the initial wave of them was just horrific.  And after awhile you become desensitized to it and can’t deal with it anymore and you want to go back to your nice life.  And we have that opportunity.  But as responsible citizens, we can’t go back to our everyday lives as far as human trafficking goes — because as consumers we’re responsible for it.  And what I try to do with my presentations is give people the chance to understand their role in it so they can take this emotional turmoil that I hope they’re experiencing when they view my media, and use it.  Use it for good.  Do something with it.

Behind the Lens: Hear Tim talk about his work with women

HG: How hopeful are you that there can be dramatic shifts in behavior that create social impacts that would reduce exploitation?  How great is the potential in corporate and consumer responsibility?

TM: What consumers can do is to start at their local retail stores and say, I want to know about this product:  Where is it from?  How was it caught?  How was it processed? Go all the way down to the first level supplier.  Undoubtedly, the store owner is not going to know. But the consumer can say, Look, I’ll work with you to find out—who do we talk to at the next level up?

And you just work your way up the chain into the suppliers.  There aren’t that many massive corporations that are controlling all of our food supplies.  Just like the media; there’s a few corporations that control all of the media.  Human trafficking is so broad-reaching because it touches so many places, and we lose sight of what we actually can do.  But the first part is to educate yourself as a consumer, and the second is to start asking questions.  Where is this from, why should I buy it, and can I guarantee to myself that this is a slave-free product?

We need to be supporting the businesses that support the growers in the supply countries.  The fact that there is a certification for organic and fair trade coffee means that it’s possible to do that with other products.  For example, the shrimping industry has had environmental impacts that are essentially bad.  People started to say, we want to be environmentally friendly, we want to be dolphin-safe.  There was a consumer movement that really pushed that to action.  We can do the same with slave labor.

Video of Tim’s work on migration through Koh Kong, a Cambodian border town, where immigrants cross land mine sown terrain to work and possibly be exploited in Thailand.  (Cambodia: Koh Kong from timmatsui.com on Vimeo)

HG: You’ve written about journalistic responsibility to truth — how storytelling has the potential to become another form of exploitation.  Journalists can take advantage of what they’re given with the wrong motivation, to create a good portfolio. How do you as a photographer approach that?

TM: It’s been an immeasurable challenge, especially when you’re working with those who have been victimized.  It depends on who you’re working with and where they are in their process. And with some of the methods of journalists in the moment, it’s like “I want this, and I know where I want to go to get it… even if I push my subject into uncomfortable grounds for that.”

I think through the sexual violence work I’ve done I’ve found that if you hang up on your shingle and say, I’m familiar with trauma and victimization and I’m open to discussion about sexual violence, you’ve broken the silence that goes along with it and people will come to you.  They need someone to go to to talk to where it’s safe.  But you’re playing a dual role because you’re not just a container with which to hold their pain.  You have to communicate it.  Although I have found people that come to me and they don’t want it to be shared, they just want a place to put it.

Behind the Lens: Hear Tim talk about his work on migration

What you’re doing as a journalist, especially working on these intense matters, is you’re developing a relationship of trust and honesty.  My job is to tell their story, and they are hopefully in a place where they want their story shared.  That comes to the victim/survivor transition zone, where they feel empowered and own their story and think, I am in a place where I want my story to maybe do some good for some other people.

HG: If their path is fully respected, rather than sensationalized.

TM: Yeah.  I’ve used my experience over the past 10 years of working with these groups to be able to ask, is this going to be safe for both of us?  It’s instinct and gut and familiarity with the issue.

HG: Do you ever feel burned out?  These aren’t the best topics for conversation at a party.  How do you bring it up with people without them feeling flattened?

TM: Finding stories of hope is important.  There’s the emotional highs and lows of it, of hearing horrific stories.  It takes its toll.  At some point you get a little more desensitized to it.  I have experienced that anger and irritation at the world that comes from the emotional exhaustion of working on a story that’s very intense, it puts you on this heightened level.  It essentially makes you a trauma victim.  If you look at how a trauma victim responds, and then look at some of the journalists who are covering things like this, or war, or disaster, all the time … you’re either desensitized, compartmentalized, or working on an elevated state of emotion.  It impacts your capacity for human interaction.  I went through a time where I had no patience for people.  If you told me that you couldn’t listen or couldn’t pay attention to something that was important to the world or the suffering of some person 6,000 miles away because you had a dinner date, I would judge you immediately and become very angry.  That’s just not a good place to be.  It doesn’t help anyone.  You  need to find a good place for your own emotion and stress so you can really tell the story better.

For more on Tim’s work, visit timmatsui.com.  All images by Tim Matsui, all rights reserved.

Thai immigration and customs officials screen people for drugs, trafficking victims, and other contraband at the Thai/Myanmar (Burma) border in Mae Sai, northern Thailand, on 15 January, 2007. A second, larger crossing is opening nearby to handle an expected increase of cross-border traffic as the “Asian Highway” is built to facilitate transport in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region, from China to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), and Vietnam. Historically plagued by human trafficking of the area’s poorer hill tribe children, according to local NGO workers the border crossing in Mae Sai is likely to grow in importance as a transit point for trafficking victims as the new transportation infrastructure eases the movement of people from poorer countries like Laos and Myanmar (Burma).

Watch the story of Srey Neth, a young Cambodian woman who is a victim of human trafficking. She speaks of her experience transitioning from victim to survivor.

(Cambodia: Srey Neth from timmatsui.com on Vimeo)

Srey Neth is a young Cambodian victim of human trafficking. In this story she speaks of her experience transitioning from victim to survivor. At 14 she was sold by her mother to a pimp for $300; a week later he sold her virginity for the same price then he forced her to serve 10-20 men per night afterwards. Her refusal was met with beatings or electrocution. Srey Neth was later rescued by police and a non governmental organization. During her recovery, which unsurprisingly has taken more than five years, she was diagnosed with HIV.

This is not just a story about the darkness in humanity. Srey Neth is a victim who has found her voice and become a survivor; I see her as a figurative Cambodia, her home country. It is culturally permissive of human trafficking after struggling through thirty years of genocide, occupation, and civil war. From a trauma and victimization standpoint, Cambodian society is still finding the voice it needs to end the exploitation.

Srey Neth has been given guidance and the opportunity to find her own path. She has learned forgiveness, found self worth, received an education, worked hard to succeed, and been given life through anti-retroviral drugs. Many in Cambodia do not have this option; Srey Neth knows this and hopes that her story of pain and healing can help. It is why she is now working in the same slum where she was sold, to help the younger children find their voice and avoid the victimization she faced. Her story is one of hope and an example for those working in the field of anti-human trafficking. Her story is also a parallel to my incomplete project on the transition Cambodia, the country, is making from victim to survivor. -Tim Matsui