Elena Rue

My Son’s Eyes

elenarue — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 05:22:24 +0000

Renee Pinkney’s 19 year-old son Don’Tay suffers from a mental illness. At age 15, he allegedly committed a crime during a psychotic episode. Don’Tay has been in jail for over a year without education or treatment for his illness. While waiting for a trial, Renee and her husband Joey are fighting to gain rights for their son and help him get out of jail.

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The Great Wide Open

elenarue — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 04:21:06 +0000

When Rachel Westbrook found out she was pregnant, she knew that she could not keep her baby, but she also knew that she needed to be in his life. Doug Dotson and Maura Dillon had been married 10 years before they discovered they could not have a baby on their own and would need to adopt to grow their family. This is a story of the open adoption of Reed William Max Dotson and the journey his birth parents and adoptive parents are experiencing together.

[College Photographer of the Year, Bronze, 2010]

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Starting Over

elenarue — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 04:04:00 +0000

North Carolina is one of two states that prosecutes all 16- and 17-year olds as adults. After being accused of being in a fight at school, Jaqwan Dancy was suspended from school and put on adult probation.

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The Lucky One

elenarue — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Alison Aucoin’s journey to adopt and parent a child from Ethiopia requires her to accept the consequences, good and bad, of the destruction of her life in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Through this experience, she questions what it means to be a woman and a mother without being a wife. She now confronts subtle and overt racism in the South as a white mother with an African daughter. Uprooted from the place of her birth, Alison strives to develop a multi-faceted definition of “home.”

Alison Aucoin and I have been collaborating on this project since April 2007, a year and a half before we traveled together to Ethiopia for Alison to adopt her daughter Ella Edelawit. Together, we have amassed thousands of photographs and dozens of hours of digital audio recordings. This project is a work in progress.

Shared Origins

elenarue — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 05:36:39 +0000

Upon my return from a fellowship in Ethiopia, I was introduced to the Lindsey-Mills family. Lory and Sonya are the adoptive mothers of two children from Ethiopia. Our shared experiences, interests, curiosity, and humor made for an instant connection, which has evolved into loving friendships and meaningful collaborations.

From the very beginning of our friendship, we dreamt about traveling to Ethiopia together. Zoe and Tsehaye had always been very eager to experience and explore their country of birth, and Lory and Sonya are committed to maintaining a relationship with Ethiopia. In August 2009 our dream was realized. Lory, Zoe, Tsehaye and I traveled to Ethiopia along with another close friend Kim Ashley.

We explored Ethiopia’s rich historical and cultural sites, reconnected with Zoe and Tsehaye’s foster caretakers and collaborated on an interview project with a local youth-led film group called Sudden Flowers Productions. Through these photographs, we hope to communicate some of the rich experiences we shared on this incredible journey.

For more about this project go to: http://sharedorigins.org

TRAILER

Love After Loss

elenarue — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:06:10 +0000

In 2006, I experienced the other side of the adoption equation during the nine months I spent in Ethiopia as a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow through the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Placed with an organization called Hope for Children, which supports children whose families have been affected by HIV and allows them to stay within their own communities, I saw the efforts Ethiopians are making to support as many children as they can.

But, too, I saw the pain developing countries feel when they have no choice but to send their children abroad. In addition to being a life-changing experience, this exposure was essential in my quest to understand adoption. Having only seen adoption from the perspective of the adoptive family, I hadn’t seen the entire picture. Although I spent time in only one country and one community, seeing these harsh realities helped me gain a more critical eye and realize the circumstances and pressures felt by communities worldwide.

Power Play

elenarue — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 04:27:14 +0000

As Detroit attempts to reinvigorate a failing economy, alternative energy pioneers have a chance to spark a new industry. Garth Schultz, a solar panel entrepreneur, is poised to begin production, start up his business and help Michigan’s factories start churning once again.

[College Photographer of the Year, Silver, 2010]

People of Plaquemines

elenarue — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 05:16:41 +0000

Liz Sullivan lives with her family in Buras, La. Her husband Donnie has worked as a shrimper his whole life, but even as the family strains to maintain normalcy, she fears her son might never go fishing with his father again.

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Five Farms

elenarue — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 05:49:47 +0000

Through audio and photographs, Five Farms puts a personal face on the lives and livelihoods of farmers across the United States. The farming families who are profiled in this project — they live in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Iowa, Arizona, and California — share their experiences in the audio stories and pictures; in a series of five one-hour radio documentaries on public radio stations nationwide, from Public Radio International and in a series of radio features first heard on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

For this project, I documented the daily lives of the Griffieon family in Ankeny, Iowa.

View Iowa Photographs

The entire project can be viewed at fivefarms.org