Hello, everyone. I’m Uur Gallenkuş, a digital artist from Istanbul. I create collages that juxtapose two images that feature the work of some of today’s most intrepid photojournalists.
By juxtaposing images from different realities, I intend to show a variety of highly relevant issues affecting today’s children: from war to poverty, hunger, child trafficking, child labor, child soldiers, immigration, health care, and education. The violation of children’s basic rights compelled me to publish this book, which shows the two faces of humanity that we have created together.
A question we all ask ourselves at some point, especially when we understand what it means to be a father, is what legacy are we leaving to the children of the world?
Drawing on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in force since 1990, the book intends to convey through these 50 collages the essential rights that every child should have, regardless of their circumstances or geography.
Each collage represents one of the specific rights of children and is accompanied by statistics that show children around the world are at risk.
With this book, I hope to inspire a shift in consciousness among adults and invite us all to leave behind our greed and ego and make today’s world a better place for children.. This book is dedicated to all the children of the world: poor or rich, in developed or underdeveloped countries, educated or uneducated, hungry or obese, dead or alive.
This book is a CALL TO ACTION!
More info: Instagram | Facebook | ugurgallenkus.com
#1 Profession Before Education
Editorial Photo: GMB Akash
This is Shaila, a 15-year-old sex worker. Due to her stepmother’s torture, she ran away from home and tried to go to her aunt’s house in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Somehow I managed to get a seat on a bus to Dhaka. There was too much traffic there, so my bus got stuck in one place for hours. It was getting dark, and I didn’t know what to do. When I got off the bus, it was midnight, 12 o’clock. I was so scared that I asked each of the passengers to give me shelter for the night. I cried and didn’t know what to do. Nobody believed me. “If someone had given me shelter for just one night that day, my life wouldn’t have gone to hell,” he said. During the trip, she was kidnapped by a group and found herself in a brothel.
# 2 Bathin During a War, Bathing During a Peace
After the Israeli airstrike, Salem Saoody, 30, bathes his daughter Layan (L) and niece Shaymaa 5 (R) in the only remaining component of their devastated house, the bathtub. 2015, Gaza.
Editorial photo : Wissam Nassar
# 3 I See You
On September 6, 2017, a Rohingya refugee girl stands close to newly arriving Myanmar refugees in Ukhiya, Bangladesh. With youngsters accounting for over 60% of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, many children under the age of 18 arrive in the makeshift tents traumatized after witnessing family members slain and homes set on fire.
Editorial Photo: K.M. Asad
# 4 First And Foremost, Children Are Children – Seesaw
Atop March 27, 2015, a Syrian youngster sits on a wrecked tank in the Syrian town of Kobane, also known as Ain al-Arab.
Editorial Photo: Yasin Akgül
# 5 Tin Soldier
On February 7, 2018, newly released child soldiers queue for registration at a release ceremony in Yambio, South Sudan. In South Sudan’s war-torn province of Yambio, more than 300 child soldiers, including 87 girls, have been discharged as part of a program to habilitate them.
Editorial Photo: Stefanie Glinski
# 6 School-Bound
On March 25, 2015, a Syrian teenager crosses a destroyed wall outside her school in the Syrian town of Kobane, also known as Ain al-Arab. Kurdish and allied forces drove Islamic State (ISIS) fighters out of Kobane on January 26
Editorial Photo: Yasin Akgül
# 7 Lunch Break
During a break at the factory where they work, two-child laborers eat their lunch. Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka.
GMB Akash
# 8 Wounded Girl With A Pearl Earring
Following bombardments on the Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of Damascus on February 21, 2018, a wounded Syrian girl receives treatment at a makeshift hospital in Kafr Batna.
Editorial Photo: Ammar Suleiman
# 9 Earning Play
Children at a brick industry in Fatullah, Bangladesh, near Dakka. They receive the equivalent of 0.9 USD for every thousand bricks they transport.
Editorial Photo: GMB Akash
# 10 Peaceful Sleep
A parent with his child in the district hospital’s intensive care unit in Mora, Cameroon’s Far North Region. Malaria, diarrhea, and malnutrition are the most common ailments among African children. Tuesday, February 20, 2019.
Editorial Photo: Pierre-Yves Bernard/MSF
# 11 Children Are Children First – Swings
On the third day of the Eid al-Adha celebration, September 3, 2017, a Syrian youngster swings in a wrecked building in the rebel-held town of Douma, on the eastern suburbs of Damascus.
Editorial Photo: Amer Almohibany
# 12 A Rohingya Refugee Mother And Child
An exodus of a Rohingya refugee mother and her child from Myanmar to Bangladesh. According to the UNHCR, over 720,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar in order to cross the border into Bangladesh..
Editorial Photo: K.M. Asad
# 13 Children Are Children First – Skiing
Children bear the heinous cost of perpetual war. Last year, as ten children from the same family walked to school, they came across an unexploded mortar bomb—a common sight in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and US-backed national forces continue to fight. The curious kids picked up the device and took it to show an aunt, not realizing what it was or the dangers it posed. And then it blew up. Three children and an elderly relative were killed, and the remaining seven people each lost at least one limb.
Noorullah Shirzada: Editorial Photo
# 14 Red Lipstick, Ocean Eyes
Rosina is her name. In Bangladesh, she is a 14-year-old sex worker.
Editorial Photo: GMB Akash
# 15 Crossing The Red Sea
On September 14, 2017, a Rohingya refugee woman holds her son after arriving by boat at the nearest beach to the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, Shah Porir Dip Island Teknaf, Bangladesh..
Editorial Photo: KM Asad
# 16 Best Friends
Noha Abu Mesleh, 5, is pictured inside her home in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
Editorial Photo: Wissam Nassar
# 17 Not All Heroes Wear Medals
Syrian men carrying babies make their way through the rubble of destroyed buildings following a reported airstrike on the rebel-held Salihin neighborhood of the northern city of Aleppo on September 11, 2016.
Ameer Alhalbi
# 18 Waiting For A Chance
In 2014, Palestinian children waited at the Dair Al Balah refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip to fill jerrycans and bottles with drinking water from public taps.
Wissam Nassar
# 19 Until Every Girl Attends School
Pakistani girls attend a school attacked twice by the Taliban. Nowshera, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, 2013.
Editorial Photo: Diego Ibarra Sanchez
# 20 Love And War
On October 13, 2018, an orphaned boy walks past a wall with drawings of rocket-propelled grenade launchers in Bol, Chad.
Editorial Photo: Marco Gualazzini
# 21 Children Are Children First – Balloons
On April 9, 2016, Syrian children run with balloons past heavily damaged buildings in the Jobar neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Damascus.
Editorial Photo: Amer Almohibany
# 22 Duality View
At Dibaga Refugee Camp, a refugee girl watches the sunset. Iraqis caught in the crossfire of the Islamic State flee to refugee camps near Mosul. The conflict has left deep scars in the psyches of children and has reversed more than two decades of educational expansion. August 2016, Iraq
Editorial Photo: Diego Ibarra Sanchez
# 23 Salvation
A child with dengue fever holds a doctor’s hand in Jalozai, Pakistan, 2012.
Editorial Photo: Diego Ibarra Sanchez
# 24 Born Fighter
In Hajjah City in Yemen, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) has been helping the maternity ward since August 2015. This new child already has a huge story in the back of him: his mother, Asima, 21 years old, suffered from eclampsia in her 5th month of pregnancy. In her 8th month, she had extreme complications and swelling in her limbs. The docs needed to carry out a cesarean to keep her lifestyle and that of her baby. August 13, 2018.
Editorial Photo: Mohammed Almahdi/MSF
# 25
Kanyaruchinya refugee camp in Goma in North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on October 20, 2012.
Editorial Photo: Marco Gualazzini
# 26 Labor Of Love
The hands of a Bangladeshi child laborer working in heavy industry.
Editorial Photo: KM Asad
# 27 Dedication
In 2014, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) provided maternal and pediatric care at the JDJ Memorial Hospital in Monrovia in response to the Ebola outbreak. MSF constructed a Barnesville Junction Hospital in Monrovia in 2015 to address pediatric care needs during the Ebola outbreak. The 92-bed hospital continues to provide specialist care for children with malaria and severe acute malnutrition who come from a wide disadvantaged urban region. Liberian nurses, medical interns, and nurse anesthetists are trained there. Thursday, February 4, 2015.
Editorial Photo: Yann Libessart/MSF
# 28 Food For Thought
Rohingya refugee children waiting for food at the Hakimpara refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar.
K.M. Asad Editorial Photo:
# 29 Billowing Smoke, Bursting Bubbles
Smoke rises from the rebel-controlled district of Jobar in eastern Damascus following the airstrikes of Syrian regime forces on April 2, 2015.
Editorial Photo: Ammar Sulaiman
