Good Morning,
My name is Cristobal Ortega-Berger. I am an aspiring visual journalist with a personal connection to the ongoing narrative of sexual assault and its effects. I am a journalism and photography duel-degree seeking student moving onto my 5th year and I have one last project I want to start before this spring semester ends. I will continue this project through the summer and next year while I am here at Storrs.
I would like to work with survivors of sexual assault to make tangible this seemingly invisible act. My goal is to create a documentary sequence to distribute in a website dedicated to mapping sexual assault on and around the Storrs UConn campus. To do this - I take my inspiration from photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson's work: Bedrooms of the Fallen.
I would like to visualize the locations of sexual assault from the eyes of victims by photographing the location(s) of sexual assault. This can be the building, the hallway, the room inside. My goal is to make tangible images that a collective group of individuals besides myself can show our community here at UConn and across Connecticut that sexual assault happens, and it is not in the shadows. The locations themselves become evidentiary - and I want to share this visual evidence in the ongoing case of proving sexual assault to a community that may not be aware of it.
If you are a victim of sexual assault or knows someone who wants to participate in sharing their locational evidence of where sexual assault happens, please contact me at your earliest convenience at cristobal.ortega@uconn.edu or call me at (860) 608-9273.
Thank you.
For more information, contact: Cristobal Ortega-Berger at cristobal.ortega@uconn.edu