The world through the eyes of children: their images, their rights
The evocative collection of images that Steve McCurry proposes in the exhibition "Children", on show at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa from 25 November 2023 to 10 March 2024, brings us closer to situations that, although distant, look at us and concern us.
The children portrayed by the American photographer are part of our own humanity and demonstrate, in the silence of the images, how it is possible to adapt "philosophically" in a world created by adults, even when this is unsuitable and uncongenial. In this perspective, the photographic exhibition meets the vision and action of Defence for Children International Italia, an organisation committed worldwide to working with and for children with the aim of promoting their human rights.
The principles evoked through the rights, which should be recognised for every child, allow us to discover, together with the beauty and strength of childhood in its different contexts, also the distance between what should be recognised and instead is systematically denied.
The journey through the world with the boys and girls proposed by McCurry benevolently urges us to understand how a large portion of our actions are not ’child-friendly’ and, therefore, not at the scale of any human being.
As a counterpoint to the visual journey, it is Defence for Children itself that suggests this important relationship between children and the world.
A pairing usefully evoked by the images in the exhibition to better understand the need to recognise, through the eyes of every child, the ownership of their rights together with the need for our concrete and immediate action in the world.