In the photograph, the teenage boy's arms are crossed, his lips taut, his eyebrows arched just enough to let us know that he is old enough to know what happened in his home, Rwanda -- and that he will not forget.
Professor Allen Stam, the photographer, accompanied a colleague from the University of Maryland on a research trip to Rwanda last summer. A series of portraits he took during his one-month expedition is now on display in the Rockefeller Center.
While in Rwanda, Stam conducted extensive interviews with a wide sample of the population, including people who participated in and those affected by the massacres of the 1990s.
Half of Stam's photos were of children, most of whom were too young to remember the devastating events of 1994. While many were photographed in orphanages, all appeared to be happy, smiling for the camera and hugging friends and caretakers.
"The kids who were born after 1994 struck me as kids anywhere else in the world," Stam said, smiling like his subjects.
Juxtaposed to the cheer of the young children was the subtle and yet brutal reality of people who lived through a time of genocide and still retained a look of utter terror in their eyes.
One of the first photos that Stam explained was of a female community political leader. Since many Rwandan men had either been killed, jailer or forced to flee, women commonly became heads of households and local government representatives.
Rwanda is organized on a "base-10 power structure to keep control," said Stam, with 10 homes -- called a hill -- answering to a cell leader, who answered to a higher level official, up to the provincial level. This organizational system enables the government to keep track of people's movements.
Three portraits were of people with AIDS, which Stam said is a huge problem in Rwanda.
The photograph that was most compelling to Stam's small audience was an interior shot of a church where between 15,000 and 20,000 people were massacred in 1994. Stam visited many such churches while in Rwanda, along with a refugee camp where thousands more had been killed.
Stam called Rwanda "a benign environment" on the surface and praised the lack of street crime and the cleanliness of the country. But such comforts could not diminish the fact that everyone from peasant to government official seemed afraid.
The two major ethnic groups in Rwanda are the Tutsi and the Hutu. The government is now run by Ugandan Tutsis, despite their minority population in the country. The political killings in the past ten years were conducted largely on ethnic lines, though Stam believes that they were not based on ethnic hatred, but on cunning political maneuvers by people trying to advance their own situations.
"It strikes me as a very sophisticated use of political resources," he said.
The Hutu Power Movement came to prominence in 1993 in response to a Tutsi invasion from other central African nations as the group sought to take control of Rwanda. The then-leaders convinced peasants to kill the Tutsis to prevent future invasions, Stam said.
In 1994 alone over 800,000 people were killed, some by neighbors, others en masse while in refugee camps.
