Statement

Sometimes when I tell people I’ve been interviewing and photographing the hungry, they look at me oddly, as if to ask, Who’s hungry?

After two years in the communities of hunger – which are also the communities of mental health, poverty, natural disasters, physical illness, addiction, childhood neglect, and sometimes, chance, I understand that the stories of hunger are profoundly complex.

Many of the people I have met have struggled to find the right words to describe the weight of responsibility, respect, kindness and dignity.

What we are given, what is planted in the first fields can be deeply mysterious in its generosity or deficiencies. Thank goodness for America’s Second Harvest, Food Banks and others who offer relief, assistance and wide nourishment to so many whose first fields or slim harvests have let them down.

As a photographer and an interviewer, I feel like an anthropologist in some ways. People die and no one remembers their stories. Everyone knows something important and valuable, a wisdom that only they know about their own experience.

The poor in our communities are often the most forgotten, the least heard. I have been profoundly inspired by each of my participants, as well as the individuals, volunteers, leaders giving so unselfishly. Each person in this exhibit has been profoundly impacted by hunger. They are our teachers and we are the students.

I have felt with a greater conviction that we all need to speak of the essential needs of our human family, and grow in our understanding of how difficult life is for so many in our country.

             -- Michael Nye

"About Hunger" will open at the Witte Museum,
San Antonio, Texas in the Fall of 2009.