« back

Mark Brecke

A Darfurian mother and her children arriving in a refugee camp in eastern Chad
© Mark Brecke

Mark Brecke is a photographer and filmmaker who has been documenting war, ethnic conflict, and genocide over ten years and three continents in some of the most troubled regions of the world including Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan, West Bank, and Iraq.

Emerging from the late 1980s experimental film community in San Francisco, he studied cinema with Phil Green (apprentice of Ansel Adams and assistant to Dorothea Lange), and continued his studies at UC Berkeley with the found footage experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin.

In 2004, Amnesty International selected Brecke's experimental documentary film War as a Second Language to be included in its permanent film archive.

Since returning from Darfur in December 2004, Brecke has been touring with his images of the Sudan crisis and has given over 60 lectures and slide presentations. He has spoken at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, UCLA School of Law, Brown University, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and the World Affairs Council. He has been featured on Current TV, NPR, and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now.

Brecke's most recent documentary film They Turned Our Deserts Into Fire (release date fall 2006) captures AMTRAK passengers' reactions to photos and stories from Darfur while Brecke was traveling from San Francisco to Washington D.C. in order to give his Darfur presentation to members of Congress in July 2005. In 2006 the U.S. Senate selected ten of Brecke's Darfur photographs to be hung in the Russell Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C.

For more information about Mark Brecke's work, please visit
www.warandweddings.com

« back