Jibita

I am a photographer based in Texas in the US. I am committed to long term documentary projects and past work has included communities living at the edge of garbage dumps, orphanages of Russia, my own family in East Texas and most recently a look at American culture through commercial haunted houses.

Jibita is the phonetic spelling of the word survivor in Bangla. Human trafficking is a wide spread problem in Bangladesh. Every year thousands of men, women and children are subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking. Many Bangladeshi citizens willingly migrate to the Middle East and Southeast Asia for better economic opportunities but are particularly vulnerable to recruitment agents who have been known to place those in their care in high debt bondage, commit fraud by switching their contracts or jobs, abuse them on the journeys, and/or sell them into a forced labor or sex situation. I spent time in Bangladesh with Winrock International and many of the survivors of human trafficking they work with. Since parts of their trafficking experience carry an extremely negative stigma, particularly for women, I opted to collaborate with subjects on portraits that conceal their identity for most of the photographs. Despite the horrors and atrocities these survivors have faced, they are moving on with their lives. I wanted to address the issue of human trafficking while also allowing these individuals some agency in their photographs. (Please note the names listed with images are aliases).