WHERE THE CHILDREN SLEEP.

4-year-old Romanian boy who shares a mattress with his family in the outskirts of Rome.

10-year-ld Ryuta is a champion sumo-wrestler living in Tokyo with his family.

12-year-old Lamine sleeps in a room shared with several other boys in the Koranic school in their Senegalese village.

14-year-old Irkena is a member of the semi-nomadic Rendille tribe in Kenya and lives with his mother in a temporary homestead in the Kaisut Desert.

14-year-old Prena is a domestic worker in Nepal and lives in a cell-like room in the attic of the house where she works in Katmandu.

14-year-old Erien slept on the floor of her favela abode in Rio de Janeiro until the late stages of her pregnancy.  

15-year-old Risa is training to be a geisha and shares a teahouse with 13 women in Kyoto, Japan. 

4-year-old Jasmine has participated in over 100 child beauty pageants and lives in a large house in the Kentucky countryside.

7-year-old Indira works at a granite quarry and lives in a one-room house near Katmandu, Nepal, with her parents, brother and sister. 

Alyssa lives in a small wooden house with her family in Appalachia.

8-88-year-old Ahkohxet belongs to the Kraho tribe and lives in Brazil's Amazon basin.

Flicking through old vice magazines I found on my boyfriends floor this morning I came across a documentary photographer James Mollison. Being extremely interested in documentary photography I researched further into his work and came across pictures from his latest photo book, ‘Where the children sleep’.

Where the children sleep is a remarkable series capturing the diversity of and, often, disparity between children’s lives around the world through portraits of their bedrooms. The project began on a brief to engage with children’s rights and morphed into a thoughtful meditation on poverty and privilege, its 56 images spanning from the stone quarries of Nepal to the farming provinces of China to the silver spoons of Fifth Avenue.

I feel the images in the book are very much a poignant photographic essay on human rights for the adult reader. The images are weirdly emotive, when you see them you want to know more about each subject, as each could tell an incredible story.

Alongside this book he has also done cheerful smile-time stuff like a series on great apes and a huge scrapbook of Palo Escobar’s home photos. Last year he went t the Kenyan-Somali border to document the residents of the Dadaab refugee camp, the world’s largest and home to 400,000 (and growing) people displaced by the region’s recurrent bouts of drought and civil warfare.

His work is breathtaking and worth a look at.

 http://www.jamesmollison.com/wherechildrensleep.php