A small book has been published about what 40 people, 20 black and 20 white, said when they were asked: “Regarding race relations, what do you wish of blacks or whites?”
Created by Eileen Williams Sabry with photography by Hoboken resident Roya Movafegh, “Wishes in Black and White” has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show for Martin Luther King Day and it has captured some people’s attention nationwide.
While living in Harlem two years ago, Movafegh said she was contacted by Sabry about her idea for the book. She agreed to take the photographs for the book, and in November of the same year, the project was completed.
Sabry found an agent, and the book was eventually published in December of 2000 by Robert D. Reed Publishers, based in California.
The book is black and white and is presented with the person’s response to the question on one page and the picture on the next.
“I hope to find that it’s really causing dialogue,” Movafegh said last week. “Racism is neither a black or white issue. We need to feel the collective pain to end it.”
Movafegh is a multi-media and photo installation artist. She was born in Vienna, Austria in 1971 and she moved with her family to her native country of Iran in 1976.
She said at the age of 10, in order to escape religious persecutions, she was forced to flee Iran with her family by van through Pakistan. She became a refugee in Germany and in 1982 moved to America. She eventually ended-up in Canada with her family, where she went to Concordia University to study photography.
“Photography became a language where I could express myself,” she said.
Through her experiences, Movafegh said she has discovered that if people do not unite, they will never grow as a society.
“We need a fundamental principle of unity,” she said. “I’ve seen what segregation does. People are uncomfortable with one another because we don’t explore and go beyond our comfort zone.”
Her work explores the dynamics of assimilation as well as the multiple facets of cultural identity. She has devoted much of her work to children working at the Baha’i Unity Center in New York City, where she reintroduces the role of the arts as a tool to awaken the human spirit and as a means to raise social awareness. Movafegh and Sabry will be at Barnes and Noble on 66th St. and Broadway in New York City all day Monday for book signings.
“We’ve been throughout the nation, to speaking engagements,” Movafegh said. “We knew it would spark interest. I find it very courageous for some people to voice their opinions about this issue.”
Always working, Movafegh is busy with her next project: “West 129th St.,” a photo illustration book about her life in Harlem.