Pep Bonet

While perusing the web site of the Eugene Smith fund, I stumbled across these amazing photographs by Pep Bonet of young men in Sierra Leone who had lost legs in the war but refused to be defeated by their loss.

He wrote of this work,

I first went there a year after the peace agreement was signed, to produce a photo essay of "Faith" for the World Press Photo Masterclass. I hooked up with groups of kids who were the most affected by the war, but who had emerged as the strongest. Young people who were amputated and blinded bouncing back to demand the chances that were stolen from them. Former child soldiers, not long before members of rebel gangs, now transforming themselves into proper police and security forces. Even kids who lost their minds in the war and living in a mental home, succeeding to return to the world of the sane.