Students walking through the Olin Library lobby have probably noticed a banner depicting a young boy and his words—“We had to leave our lovely city”—framing his solemn face. The banner is a portrait of a thirteen-year old refugee named Uryi, who fled Blarus in 2000 to seek political asylum in the British seaside town of Margate. Wendy Ewald, who took the photograph, is one of three internationally renowned documentary photographers whose work is currently on display in the Zilka Gallery.

“I’ve been really interested in thinking about how we express ourselves with images,” Ewald said. “I wanted to give pictures meaning beyond the surface.”

Last Friday, Ewald took part in a panel discussion at the Center for the Arts about the role of photography in the representation of history. The panel discussion was a part of “Eye of History: The Camera As Witness,” a conference devoted to exploring the relationship between history and photography.

“Eye of History” was unique in that it brought together not only artists and curators, but also historians, documentary photographers and critics — most notably David Levi Strauss and former New York Times editor Vicki Goldberg.

“What made the participants feel was valuable and unique about the conference was that it brought together people from many different disciplines, all thinking in the broadest terms about what it means to use photography in history,” said Associate Professor of History Jennifer Tucker, who organized the conference.

“Eye of History” is part of a greater series of conferences hosted by The History and Theory Journal—the journal periodically holds exhibitions and lectures on a special theme and publishes the resulting papers. The papers for this particular conference will be published in December of 2009.

For Strauss, history and the visual arts are directly related. While skeptical of the power of pure information, he believes photography is becoming the most dependable means of recording history.

“Masses of data are not memorable, Strauss said. “Images are memorable; stories are memorable.”

Nina Felshen, who curated the exhibitions at the Zilkha Gallery, was responsible for assembling the panel of speakers for the event. The three panelists—internationally renowned photographers Eric Gottesman, Wendy Ewald, and Susan Meiselas—have done their recent work in a vast range of countries, but they all agree on the importance of photography in recording the past and shaping the future.

In order to make their work more genuine, all three photographers collaborated with the subjects of their photographs.

“This is work that challenges certain accepted assumptions about photography,” Felshen said. “The subject-artists, who could be described once as victims, are suddenly bestowed with some power.”

Presenting the truest representation of their subjects, however, can be difficult. Gottesman, who has been photographing Ethiopia since 1999, spoke of his struggle to make images that counter the way the media and popular photojournalism in the Western world perceives Africa—as a place of starving children and grave poverty.

“I didn’t want to make the same images of starving children, but there were no other images to make,” Gottesman said.

In Somalia, he used a different approach, including the names and ages of each person he photographed.

“A woman [who saw the photos] called me and said she was crying because it so struck her,” Gottesman said. “That was about not using people as just symbols, but rather as people.”

Like Gottesman, Wendy Ewald added another dimension to her photographs. Over the course of 18 months, Ewald worked with 22 child refugees who had fled to Margate because of war, poverty, or domestic struggles. Ewald enhanced her portraits by using the children’s own words—as she did with the portrait of Uryi. She also enlisted the power of voice itself, inserting sound bites from the children in a photo reel shown during the panel discussion.

“We all feel that photographs alone are not enough,” Ewald said. “The spoken voice adds a whole other important layer.”

In a similar vein, when Susan Meiselas set out on her six-year project to recover the lost history of Kurdistan—a country essentially wiped off the globe after World War I—she employed a combination of both words and images. Meiselas collected all the photographs, maps, historical documents, and oral histories of the Kurds in an attempt to represent the Kurds as culturally and historically accurate as possible.

“I wouldn’t be able to assume the responsibility of the history of the Kurds, but I thought I could be a needle and stitch through the outsiders, in a sense,” Meiselas said.

Though Gottesman, Ewald, and Meiselas all struggled to keep their work true to their subjects, their unique approaches reflect their understanding of the essential role of documentary photography in the world.

“Representation of photography becomes the representation of history,” Gottesman said. “It’s how we see the past.”

The work of all three panelists is on display at Zilkha Gallery from Sept. 13 to Dec. 7 in an exhibit entitled “Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography.”