Traditions and Resistance

Brian Adams

Featuring: Brian Adams, Enayat Asadi, Sharon Castellanos, Gui Christ, Shefali Rafiq

“In the face of modern forces, they’re standing their ground.”

This collection of projects supported by the Pulitzer Center explores themes of cultural traditions and resistance. It showcases the resilience of communities around the world as they fight to preserve and revitalize traditions that sustain livelihoods and create hope for the next generation.

Viewers will meet the nomadic Bakhtiari women of Iran, who play an outsized role in keeping families together; women and girls of the Gujjar and Bakarwal tribal communities in Kashmir, who are fighting patriarchy to help the next generation of tribal women take care of their menstrual health; rural Andean communities in Peru using sustainable agriculture to preserve human life; the Indigenous Amazonian Gamella people persisting in their efforts for legal land reclamation; and the Native Alutiiq people of Alaska reclaiming and preserving their ancestral heritage in the face of government attempts at erasure.

These are stories of quiet resistance through the preservation and revival of ancestral traditions, despite threats of urbanization, climate change, or conflict and displacement.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Brian Adams is an editorial and commercial photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska, specializing in environmental portraiture. His work has been featured in both national and international publications, and his work documenting Alaskan Native villages has been showcased in galleries across the United States and Europe.

Iranian-born Enayat Asadi is a visual researcher. His photography concentrates on social problems, violence, human rights violations, poverty, injustice, and social discrimination. In 2009 he began teaching himself photography. Two years later, he traveled to Afghanistan and covered the war there. From 2017 to 2019, he began photographing Afghan immigrants and covering illegal immigration. He has dedicated his career to documenting the lives of Middle Eastern people.

Sharon Castellanos is a freelance photographer based in Cusco, Peru, since 2013. She has worked four-plus years as a press photographer for a national coverage newspaper in Lima City and as a correspondent for the same media in the Cusco and Puno regions.

In 2020, she produced a web multimedia project supported by The National Geographic Society. Her current projects aim to explore and demystify the ancestral knowledge of farmers in the Andean communities to predict and prepare for environmental changes.

Gui Christ is Brazil-based photographer working on Brazilian cultural, economic, and environmental issues. For the last 7 years, he has been working as a regular contributor to international media outlets like National Geographic, TIME, The Washington Post, BBC, Al Jazeera, Billboard, Esquire, and others.

Shefali Rafiq is an independent multimedia journalist based in Kashmir. Her work focuses on human rights, gender, and society. Her work has featured in openDemocracy, gal-dem magazine, and Foreign Policy, among other international publications.

Organizations

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

The Pulitzer Center’s mission is to champion the power of stories to make complex issues relevant and inspire action. Founded in 2006, the Center is an essential source of support for enterprise reporting in the United States and globally. The thousands of journalists and educators in our networks span more than 80 countries, and our work reaches tens of millions of people each year through our news-media partners. The journalism we support covers the world’s biggest challenges today, from the environment and global health to human rights and artificial intelligence.