Jean-Paul, from the series Intended Consequences, 2006

Proceeds from the sale of this print benefit both Aperture Foundation and Foundation Rwanda.

"This photograph of Jean-Paul was taken in 2006 while working on my Intended Consequences project in Rwanda. Jean-Paul was thirteen years old and living with his mother, a genocide survivor, in a crumbling one-room mud house just a couple of hours' drive from Kigali, the Rwandan capital. He was not going to school at the time because his mother could not afford to buy him a uniform and shoes. Today, he is fifteen years old, back in school, and doing well thanks to the support of Foundation Rwanda, a non-profit I co-founded to support secondary school education for children born as a result of sexual violence during the 1994 genocide."

—Jonathan Torgovnik

An estimated twenty thousand children were born of rapes that occurred during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Fifteen years later, the mothers of these children still faced enormous challenges, among them being stigmatized within their communities for bearing a child fathered by a Hutu militiaman. Over a three-year period, photographer Jonathan Torgovnik made repeated visits to Rwanda to document the experiences of these women, allowing them to tell their stories. These portraits and testimonies are featured in the artist's monograph, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape (Aperture, 2009). They offer intensely personal accounts of these survivors' experiences of the genocide, as well as their conflicted feelings about raising a child who is a living reminder of horrors endured.

In addition to financing the education of children born of rapes committed during the 1994 genocide, Foundation Rwanda, cofounded by Torgovnik, links their mothers to existing psychological and medical support services and creates awareness about the consequences of genocide and sexual violence through photography and new media.

C-Print
Image Size: 14 x 14 inches
Paper Size: 16 x 20 inches
Edition of 25 + 4 Artist Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Jonathan Torgovnik (b. 1969, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel) has exhibited and published his photographs in numerous international publications, including Newsweek, Aperture, GEO, Sunday Times Magazine, and Stern. He has been a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine since 2005, and is on the faculty of the International Center of Photography School in New York. In 2007, Torgovnik won the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from the series Intended Consequences. In 2009, Aperture published his book Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape.