Ethan Knight: Faith

Photo © Ethan Knight-All Rights Reserved

Ethan Knight is a documentary photographer and a film maker whose work focuses on the impact of war and poverty on marginalized societies. Currently based in Auckland, New Zealand, his work has been published by The New York Times, the National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, Lonely Planet Images, Australian Geographic and New Zealand Geographic amongst other publications. He also worked with NGOs such as UNHCR, ICRC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Ethan suggested I viewed his Northern Sri Lanka/Jaffna gallery of images, especially those of the Festival of Murugan, The Tamil god of war, but I went further and viewed his entire Faith Gallery in which he features about 34 monitor-sized images of photographs made in Jerusalem, in Sri Lanka and Kenya.

I thought his most powerful images in the Faith gallery were those of the Thaipusam religious festival, especially those of devotees rolling on the ground for 2 kilometers to the entrance of a temple, and self-inflicting wounds to their bodies in the hope of redemption.

After doing so, you may wish to recuperate from the graphic images by viewing Ethan's photographs of the New Zealand Fashion Week 2011.