Photo Exhibit/Talk Root Cafe

PRESS RELEASE:        Instants
in Upheavals, images of our times

Exhibition
talk Friday, Nov. 15, 7 p.m. The Root Café, Lakewood

Contacts:
Julie Hutchinson at The Root Café, Lakewood, 216-226-4401

Chuck
Sudetic at 1 917 435 3526 and  lelacerie@hotmail.com

Rarely in a local café outside of Paris or London can
you happen upon a photograph on a wall and encounter something like two young
people as they are experiencing an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Rarely can
you see an image of a pre-teen girl in the Congo—where the incidence of rape is
the highest in recorded history—as she testifies before a military court about
being assaulted by a soldier. Rarely can you see a snapshot of a harmless,
bespectacled old man who, as a high school student on June 28, 1914, stood on
Sarajevo sidewalk and fingered the detonator of a concealed hand grenade as he
prepared to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir-apparent to the throne
of the Austrian Empire.

From November 4 to December 15, Instants
in Upheavals, a collection of
these and scores of similar photographs will be on display at The Root Café in
Lakewood. The images were captured over the past thirty years by a former New
York Times, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones reporter, Chuck Sudetic, a Cleveland-area native.
“These are personal mementos I took with a camera for idiots set on AUTO so my
kids might see and feel and reflect on our world and its transience,” Sudetic
said. “Some pictures are personal in the extreme, including images of a pretty
chancy search a friend and I undertook for the remains of a young Bosnian
killed at Srebrenica in 1995.”

The upheavals include the fall of Communism in
Eastern Europe; the scourge of ethnic nationalism; the economic sanctions
against Iraq that, thanks to Saddam Hussein and the curse of the country’s oil
economy, killed more civilians than all the chemical, biological, or nuclear
weapons used in human history; the plight of so many Africans as they deal with
AIDS, tuberculosis, and conflicts over oil, diamonds, and rare minerals; and
the human-induced warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The goal of the exhibit is to show concretely how
close seemingly distant places in the world are to America and Cleveland and
Lakewood and how interconnected all 7.1 billion of us have become,” Sudetic
said. “These are images of death, mourning, joy, folly, illness, exhaustion,
defiance, violence, reconciliation, insult, and child’s play. They are intended
to provoke discussion, because they provide insight into personal narratives
interwoven with radical historical changes that have, over the past three
decades, altered decades-old patterns of life, thought, and emotion even in
Lakewood.”

The
Root Café will host a free talk on the photographs at 7:30 p.m., November 15.

Time
and space permitting, Sudetic will give talks on the photographs to groups of
young people, including students and teachers from local high schools, community
colleges, and universities.