26 January – 24 February 2018 at CEPA’s FLUX Gallery (1st Floor), 617 Main Street, Buffalo, NY

All photographs © Orin Langelle

As a concerned photographer, I created Portraits of Struggle to show a glimpse of some of the people and situations I’ve documented in my five decades behind a lens.

The photographs presented are united by the intertwined threads of social, economic or ecological injustice and peoples’ resilience or resistance to them. Many of the harsh realities of injustice are linked with the struggle for the land and what it is used for.

Showing how these issues are intrinsically linked is crucial to understanding the whole–to seeing the big picture–instead of compartmentalizing each separately. If we want to successfully challenge injustice, we must understand that everything is interconnected. The root causes of these problems are often one and the same.

I am very fortunate and grateful to have had the opportunity to see and capture what I have viewed and to pass that on for others to see. It was not as simple as just picking up and camera and taking snapshots. Many events have shaped my vision along with many people.

And many photographers have influenced my work: Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Mary Ellen Mark, Tina Modotti, Peter Beard (especially his work The End of the Game) and countless others.

But it’s not just photographers either. It’s the question of why? It’s life itself.
It’s war along with the government/corporate propaganda machine that dominates life. And the new normal: climate chaos that rears its ugly face, more and more, encompassing the entire Earth and all of its inhabitants. And it is the peoples’ resistance to all of these injustices.

Portraits of Struggle opened as a one-person show at CEPA Gallery (Contemporary Photography & Visual Arts Center), in Buffalo, NY 26 January– 24 February 2018, Buffalo, NY.

It was traveled and was a one–person show during Earth Month (April) 2019 at University of Mount Union in Alliance, OH and a one–person show at the “The Resurgence: 2019 Forest & Climate Movement Convergence” held in October 2019 in southern IL’s Shawnee National Forest.