Kitty Leaken Photography

      I was born near the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa. My Father, from California, and mother from Mississippi were young diplomats posted to the dual capitals of Cape Town and Pretoria. My brother was born four years later in Lagos, Nigeria with only a few years in the states. Our Family lived overseas around three years a stint, in Bern, Warsaw, Mexico City and Manila. It was a youth of movement of observing the flow of the world.

   In Africa, my nanny Lena strapped me to her soft warm body and carried me to the market to buy yellow squash that she boiled, a taste I remember. I was twelve when I followed my Polish friend Marlena, tracking her by her long blond braids, as we wove across Warsaw on trams, buses, bicycles and on foot. We were intrepid explorers, swift and unnoticed.

   In a food market in Baguio, Philippines at around seventeen, I inquired a strange fruit. The vendor broke it open and offered me a taste. She indicated that I should spit out the seeds, and I complied awkwardly, to the amusement of others nearby, it was a slow day in the market, and the ladies held out hands with exotic fruits for me to sample. Nods of approval all around when I smiled, laughter when I grimaced. I had a camera with me and it seemed for the first time a very good time to make portraits of my new friends.

    I graduated high school in the Philippines, then back in the states, Stanford University before moving to Santa Fe in January 1981.

     At the Santa Fe New Mexican, my boss and mentor Steve Northup encouraged us not to "take" photos but to "make" photos. He taught photo journalism with integrity and respect: we did not chase ambulances. 

    On assignment, I met Choezem who had just arrived in Santa Fe with around 20 Tibetan Refugees in a resettlement program. So brave to leave their families in India. I was interested in how they would keep their culture as they adapted to life in the U.S. That photodocumentary, Keeping Faith became part of a year long exhibit at the museum of international Folk Art in Santa Fe called At Home Away from Home.

   The exhibit also included paintings from Art Refuge, a nonprofit providing places for Tibetan youth to paint and play in safety during their journey into exile. Art of Exile. Paintings by Tibetan Children in India - Museum of New Mexico Press - Featured youth compelled to leave their Chinese occupied homeland to attend Tibetan-run school in India. I made a short film, Dance of young Nomads, again about culture in exile. As a program director for the nonprofit. I spend months in India and Nepal, finding my photographic vison as I worked to help the Tibetan cause.

     Ama Adhe, a Tibetan heroine who had survived torture, starvation and being left for dead in a pile of bodies during 26 years of prison, oversaw the painting club in Dharamsala on the rooftop of the reception center for New Arrivals where she had been given a permanent room. The children had nothing to do while they awaited placement in a Tibetan run school in India, and many were still terrified by the traumatic escape across the Himalayas that included blizzards. frostbite, snow blindness and arrest or being shot at by the border patrols. Our Paintings clubs, with Ama's oversight, gave them a time and place to feel safe. We had volunteers from all over the world, highly qualified as trauma specialist, art therapist and special education.

     I would sit in the room when the children came after lunch. The tension would be palpable fear, homesickness, missing family, one set of clothes, strange country, future unsure. Paper and watercolors, paints and crayons passed around. Some had never held a brush. Many hesitant about the blank sheet in front of them. The room still noisy with undercurrent of unease. As little and big hands started to draw, encouraged by the enthusiasm of some who had already attended. the room would begin to quiet as restless energies found creative expression. It's a lingering impression of the power of art that I hold most dear.

     Art Refuge expanded tp Yasodara Devi Balika Niwasaya in Sri Lanka, a home from Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim girls orphaned by civil war and the tsunami.