When Lucy Bassett was a child, her mother had a makeshift darkroom in their family’s basement. “We’d be folding laundry and also hanging pictures on the clothesline,” she said. Bassett stayed interested in photography and recently wove it into her work as a professor of practice in public policy at UVA’s Batten School.
At UVA, Bassett serves as an expert in children and caregivers in humanitarian contexts, working to improve early child development outcomes. In the aftermath of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shook southeastern Türkiye and northern Syria in February 2023, Bassett became concerned about the 2.5 million people, many of them children, who were displaced by the disaster and were now living in crowded container camps.
About a year after the immediate earthquake response when most displaced people had settled into container camps, Bassett visited two camps in Hatay, Türkiye, the area hardest hit by the earthquake. There, working with the humanitarian organization Save the Children, she led a project to learn about the perspectives of young children in the camps, giving 23 5–10-year-olds 35-millimeter disposable cameras, training them to look through the viewfinder, and asking them to take photos of their daily lives. The children had two weeks to take the photos, and their work resulted in hundreds of vibrant, colorful images that showed their unique perspectives of life in the camp.
‘The Way We See It’
Bassett said she was struck by the power of the children’s photos, noting that we rarely have a chance to see the world from a young child’s point of view, especially in some of humanity’s toughest conditions. She chose 10 of the photos to be included in a new art installation, “The Way We See It,” on display starting Feb. 18 on the second floor of Shannon Library as part of the Art in Library Spaces program.
“By capturing fleeting moments of joy and everyday beauty, these young photographers transform a site of displacement into a place of meaning,” she wrote in her artist’s statement about the project. “This act of documenting their world fosters a vital connection — to one another, to their immediate surroundings, and now, to a wider audience.”
On Feb. 25, the UVA community is invited to Bassett’s artist’s talk on “The Way We See It,” to be held on the second floor of Shannon Library, in the gallery space between the main elevators and central staircase from 4 - 5 p.m.
Ahead of that event, we spoke to Bassett about her experience working with the children in Türkiye as well as some of her favorite photographs in “The Way We See It.”
Q: Why did you want to do a project like this? How did it come about?
A. In recent years, I noticed that so much of my work was for children, but rarely by them or with them. And so, I wanted to shift my entire vision and approach to be more child-friendly and creative.
I heard about this methodology called photovoice, where people take photos of their own lives and comment on them. The photography and reflection practice can bring about social change. So, I took a training in that and then was looking for collaborators to put it into practice.
A few months after the Türkiye earthquake in 2023, I met a UVA alumna — a 2018 Batten graduate — who was the communications and advocacy lead for Save the Children and had been coordinating the earthquake response. I mentioned the photovoice project idea and she loved it, and helped make it happen through Save the Children.
Q. What was your experience like working with children in the container camps?
A. I went to the container camps two different times between February and May 2024 and was there for the core activities of the project. Training the youngest kids – 5- and 6-year-olds – in photography was amusing. There was singing and dancing involved.
The kids took their photos and then we printed them. And then we discussed with the kids: What do you see in this photo? Why did you want to take this? What do you want the viewer to see? We did a whole research project on that, trying to make sense of what they appreciated and what they were struggling with and gave recommendations to Save the Children, who made some small changes in the camp, and then presented more broadly in Türkiye to municipal leaders and organizations like UNICEF.
At the end of the program, the kids each got to pick their favorite photos, and we made large prints of them. We had a big exhibition in each camp; families came, the whole community came — including donors and municipal leaders. At that moment, the children got a chance to be the artists. I'm very excited that they are, even more now, recognized as real artists.
Q: Do have any favorite images in “The Way We See It”?
A. It was so hard to limit the photos. This is a small subset — there were hundreds of them. I wanted to show the color and the vibrancy. And these are also just really beautiful photographs, regardless of if they were taken by kids.
One of them that I love is Yekta’s image of her father, and he’s kind of looming above the viewer. I love that because it really reminds us that kids took these photos and that to a small child, adults look so big and the world looks so big. And I think that that is one of the overarching messages of the exhibit: Kids see the world in different ways. And wouldn't it be great if we could be curious about that?
Another one that is kind of small, down in the bottom lefthand corner, is a girl who’s actually gone back to visit her destroyed home. I was surprised, because it was rare for the kids to leave the camp, but a few of them used this opportunity to go back to their homes that meant so much to them. With their cameras, they got to go back with this sense of importance: I can show this to someone else. I can tell my story. In Hande’s photo, the girl is cocking her hip out, and she has this “little kid” sort of posture. To me, it signifies a sense of resilience and optimism and energy. She can be devastated by the loss of her home, but she can still go back and want to take pictures of it, and want to talk about it.
But my very favorite — such a favorite that I want to have a copy at my house — is on the top. It’s a photo of the sky with a tiny, little slanted sliver of the container. I think it’s beautiful, but there’s also a really moving backstory. There was this really shy, 5-year-old Syrian boy, Akmal, and the Syrians in the group were the minority in the camp, and they were a little bit removed, even though they still participated. And he said, “When you look at this photo, I want you to see the world.” To have a 5-year-old say that! He lives in such a constrained, spare space that from the outside looks so lifeless, and he was looking up at possibility and hope and something bigger.
Q. Could you talk about what has driven you to do humanitarian work with children? I can imagine it’s beautiful and uplifting on one hand but also painful seeing children in such dire circumstances.
A big source of my passion for this work comes from my time in the Peace Corps in Guatemala before I went to undergrad and grad school. I spent a lot of time with kids because I lived in an Indigenous community, and I couldn't speak the language very well at first, but kids can communicate without language and [through] play, and so they were my entry point to feeling connection and understanding and belonging. And I also saw how little they had access to school, and how little they ate, and how much domestic violence and alcoholism was happening and affecting them, how early they were getting married off and having kids.
And then I went to grad school and studied nutrition, and I started working as a social protection specialist at the World Bank, and I learned that if you do change a trajectory early on, or provide support, it has a big impact on the rest of a child’s life. Even if you do some small things, it has such a big return, in terms of making a difference for a kid’s experience.
We interviewed the parents as part of this photovoice project, and some of them said that for those little kids, participating in the project made them feel important. They felt so special. After losing everything they had, to actually have a thing [a camera] that they could take care of, and to be able to have a skill and to be seen as an expert, an artist … I didn’t realize how much agency it would give them.
Q: What do you hope viewers take away from this exhibition?
We have a wall where people can write reactions to the photos and messages to the artists. Because this was such a living and dynamic process to create with the kids, I wanted the exhibit to have even a tiny flavor of that. I wanted it to have an interactive, reflective, and maybe even playful dynamic.
And I've developed a short guide for teachers in the area with a bit of background, and then some questions they could use for discussion with their kids. So, I’m hoping we'll have a parade of young children, around the age of the artists or slightly older. I'm hoping they might come in and just have it spark conversation about, how does being behind the camera lens change the way you see things?
Q. Is there anything else that you would like to add?
All children and their families gave consent to participate in the project and to have their photos used.
And Save the Children agreed to help find the particular kids who are featured in “The Way We See It” and to let them know that they were in this exhibition, which makes me happy.
“The Way We See It”: Artist Talk will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 25, from 4-5 p.m. on the second floor of Shannon Library, in the gallery space between the main elevators and central staircase. The exhibition will be on display through December 2026.
*The names listed in this exhibit are pseudonyms to protect the children’s identities.