Amanita photo by Edith Darmon

An eight-year-old girl stares at the camera, the hot West African sun splashing across her shoulders like a translucent cape. Tightly braided hair hugs her scalp, accentuating a delicate forehead, a slightly furrowed brow. She wears a thin white wrap fastened around her neck with a fraying fiber cord. She shoots the lens an expression that almost approaches a smile, almost breaks into the bright songs of childhood, but instead she resists, and it is the viewer’s heart that breaks.

“There was one girl there, in the West African village of Toucouleur. Her name was Aminata.” Photographer Edith Darmon’s voice shakes. She speaks in fast, even syllables, as if rushing the story will dampen the pain of memory. “She was always pretty sad. Her mother got divorced by her father and didn’t want to raise her children any more. She left Aminata and went on with her own life. Nobody wanted this girl. All of the girls ate from one bowl, but they wouldn’t even allow her to eat the leftovers. She had to beg the boys and try to get crumbs from the boys’ bowl.”

Edith shares a story as bold and stark as her photographs, a story of poverty, of a people who live on the edge of starvation, a people who wear clothes the colors of thunderstorms, colors that mimic the earthy greens and electric blues of their native mudskipper lizard. Edith’s photographs are on exhibition at the Ray Drew Gallery now through February 6, in a show titled “Women of My Heart.”

“Everyone has beautiful clothes there, even though they own nothing else,” Edith continues. “Aminata’s clothes were stashed away, and even on a baptism day she was the last one to be dressed. She was the unwanted one. Nobody’s daughter. On the day of that picture one of her uncle’s sisters says she’s going to take her. They tell Aminata to go and pack, and she does it in five minutes. Her aunt grabs her by the arm. She’s crying, she’s being pushed out of the only village she has ever known. My thought was that if I could take her picture and then sell it, the money from that picture could give her schooling or clothes. Something she needs.”

Edith was born in Algeria, immigrating to the United States as a teenager. She traveled back to her homeland 12 years ago where she first developed a fascination with the faces of women, with the expressions of hope and responsibility that women in impoverished places learn to carry. A linguist who teaches at the United World College in Montezuma, Edith found that her language skills gave her opportunities to fully connect with women in tiny villages across the world.

“I started to get in touch with women, with women’s faces, the reality of the conditions of women in the world,” Edith muses. “I started taking their photographs with the hope that if I could sell them, I could go back to those women who are carrying so much weight and make a difference in their lives.

Using a 35 mm Minolta camera, Edith shot pictures of women in Laos, West Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Her portraits are achingly human; each subject carefully poses, as if to still the moving soul, as if to capture the Senegal wind. Many of Edith’s photographs were taken while visiting her daughter in the Peace Corps, in a tiny Senegalese village called Pakane Toucouleur.

In “Mother and Son in the Peanut Field,” a young mother sports a vivid red scarf wrapped around her head and a sweetly grinning boy in her lap. She laughs at the camera, her mouth as spread in smile as her son’s. In “Girl in Yellow and Purple Sari,” a young woman keeps her arms close to her body as she looks into the lens. She, too, smiles, her hair parted in the center, cascading over her shoulders. The breathtaking psychedelic color of her sari nearly overpowers her; the yellow dress is sashed in an explosion of purple, orange, and green paisley. It is almost as if the sari owns the wearer.

Several of Edith’s photographs feature men, a subject Edith says she is just beginning to appreciate. In “On the Pilgrimage to Pavarti,” an old man in an ochre turban and matching robe stands so close to the lens you can feel his breath on your face as you consider his portrait. His eyes don’t stare you down – they focus on something behind you, perhaps, something that may have caught his eye. You can imagine him ambling down the road, stopping for prayer as the spirit speaks.

“You have to pick someone,” Edith explains, when asked why she chose these villages, these people, to highlight. “Why is the world against them like that? So many children all over the world. Unwanted. They struggle. Especially girls. We don’t know, we don’t have any real idea of how many there are. We are overfed, over-enjoyed, we try not to eat too much to put on weight. And there, everyone is starving.”

“We have a lot.” Edith pauses to gather her thoughts. You can see the village of Toucouleur as she speaks. It rises behind her voice, a hidden ghost. Hundreds of starved shadows march through my mind as she reminds me of our own American wealth. “We have access to so much. We waste so much. All of those pieces are so real to me. The pictures are just a way to connect to the big world. I love my life and my place here, and my responsibility is to keep going, keep traveling, and telling these stories through my pictures.”

Edith laughs as she tells the story of how the villagers treasured their portraits, hanging them in their simple huts, inviting visitors to come inside and see the colorful photographs.

“But those pictures don’t belong to me, you see,” she insists. “They belong to the people. It holds their faces, their souls. If I can sell some of these pieces, I can give back to these wonderful people. That’s my goal.”

The future holds more travel for Edith. She hopes to visit Nepal next, to spend two months photographing women – this time using a new digital camera.

“I am playing with the idea of Nepal,” she says. “I am 57 years old, and I don’t know how many more years I can backpack up the hill. Not this coming summer, but the next. We went to the HImalayans in the dark, and it was so amazing. The people are so kind and wonderful and warm, and it was just a good place to hike and explore and be in the mountains. But there are so many places that are teasing me.”

You can examine Edith Darmon’s incredible photographs in “Women of My Heart,” now on exhibition through February 6th at the Ray Drew Gallery. The Gallery is now open Saturday and Sunday from 1-7 pm in addition to its weekday hours of 9-7 pm.