Paula Allen
GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
For over three decades, Paula Allen has concentrated on photographing women around the world in their courageous and often invisible confrontations with violence and oppression. From a 'safe house' in Kenya where girls escape female genital mutilation; to a village in Kosovo in which only the women and children survived the war; from the streets of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico where women march to demand investigations of the murders of young female factory workers, to Asia, where "comfort women" break silence by telling their stories of military sexual slavery by Japan during World War II, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and Chechnya — Allen has documented women's determination in the pursuit of freedom, truth and justice.
In 2013, Allen published a second edition of her book "Flores en el Desierto/Flowers in the Desert" (University Press of Florida) which tells the story of a group of women in the northern desert of Chile as they searched for 17 years for their relatives who were 'disappeared' after the 1973 coup.
Allen works often for human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Refugees International and V-DAY. Her images from these assignments have been used as the focus of human rights campaigns throughout the world. Allen frequently lectures at universities and is represented by Speaking Matters.