PRESENTATIONS
p h oto by J ORDAN CAMPBELL
PRESENTATIONS
Kevin Connolly (saturday, 3:45 p.m., palm)
Growing up in Montana, Kevin Michael Connolly floated rivers, climbed and skied like any other kid — except he wasn’t like any other kid: “I was born without legs. This is all I’ve known and to me, it’s not really a big deal. I think it was called a ‘sporadic birth defect,’ which is basically the doctors saying they don’t know what happened.” Connolly has been asked if he was in a car accident, is a veteran or was eaten by a shark. As he writes, “Everyone tries to create a story in their heads to explain the things that baffle them. For the same reason, we want to know how a magic trick works or how a mystery novel ends. We want to know how someone different, strange or disfigured came to be as they are. Everyone does it. It’s natural. It’s curiosity.” His situation hasn’t prevented him from traveling the world, mostly on a skateboard. (He rarely uses a wheelchair and abandoned prosthetics when he was 12.) On a solo trip through Europe, he grew tired of people staring at him, so he started taking surreptitious pictures of onlookers as he rolled by. He explains, “Before any of us can ponder or speculate, we react. We stare. Whether it is a glance or a neck-twisting
John Dau (saturday, 3:35 p.m., SOH)
ogle, we look at that which does not seem to fit in our day-to-day lives. It is that one instant of unabashed curiosity — more reflex than conscious action — that makes us who we are.” Those photos from Europe comprise the “Rolling Exhibition,” which led to a book deal (Double Take) and now a TV show on the Travel Channel called “Armed and Ready.” With his work, he’s trying to challenge the way people not only look at him, but at the world. According to Connolly, he likes “…making it difficult for people. I don’t want to give people the luxury of staring at someone who’s weird — and moving on. I don’t want to make it that easy for people. I think that…the job of any photographer, or anyone who can call themselves an artist, is to make people question what they do on reflex…to make people question a value or an idea that’s so common that people haven’t really looked at it yet.”
In 1983, a horrific civil war broke out in Sudan. Four years later, the government attacked many villages in the south, intending to kill all the men. An exodus of young men — the Lost Boys of Sudan — headed for the relative safety of Ethiopia, but they had to survive soldiers, starvation and predators to reach that country. John Dau was one of the leaders of the Lost Boys. One horrible night, when he was 12, he woke up to the sounds of bullets in his village and had to leave his home and family to save his life. His next six years were spent largely on the run, finding whatever food and water he could, while watching fellow refugees fall victim to hungry leopards and armed militias. It took him 16 years to get from South Sudan to Syracuse, New York, where he was featured in the documentary God Grew Tired of Us (Mountainfilm 2007). His experience
is one of the most remarkable survival stories ever told at Mountainfilm. Dau has spent much of his time in the U.S., working steadily to build medical facilities in South Sudan, such as the eye clinic he created with eye surgeon Geoff Tabin. Dau and Tabin will be available for Q&A after both screenings of the documentary Duk County (page 21), which chronicles the collaboration between the two men and illustrates Dau’s determination to improve the lives of his people and the enormous challenges they face. At the first screening on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. at the Sheridan Opera House, Dau will give an additional presentation about his life and his work. This is Dau’s first appearance at Mountainfilm and Tabin’s fourth (as a presenter in both 2001 and 2011 and as a judge in 2012).
Kevin Connolly will give a presentation at the Palm on Saturday at 3:45 p.m., and you can see his photography at Arroyo (see page 80).
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