NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times
October 2, 2018
By David Gonzalez
A child’s sleeping bag. A pair of swim goggles. A bland landscape. These unremarkable items and scenes, barely noticed by most people, can instill dread — or worse — among some people. To survivors of clerical sexual abuse, they can be daily triggers, reminding them in an instant of the moment when their trust was betrayed, and their faith left in tatters.
Tomaso Clavarino, a documentary photographer in Turin, Italy, had been following the Roman Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse crisis for a few years and was struck by how so many of the stories he saw used stock images of churches or priests. To him, it was as if the victims had been relegated to invisibility, in some cases shunned by their neighbors or disbelieved by their family. A little more than two years ago, he set out to document survivors, as well as the places and things that still linger in their minds.
“I moved around and went to churches, woods, in the mountains, trying to visualize those places,” Mr. Clavarino said. “Those places are the places where me, you, my friends grew up. They are part of ordinary life. Of course, they are not amazing photos, but the quietness of these places is, for me, very frightening. We pass by them, but they have meaning.”
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