Mined lives: ten years later: the crusade to put an end to anti-personnel landmines.

• Author: Zaldivar, Trinidad

An instant. An instant. It only takes an instant to click, press the shutter, and capture an image of Mónica, Manuel, Sofía, Adis, Fanar, and Skherum behind the lens. It also only took an instant for powder and shrapnel to turn to blood and destroy each one of their dreams. Now the pain of their mutilated bodies is what is captured on film. Lives mined by war, each one an epic story. It's that instant that they all have m common--the instant that they encountered a landmine. They were headed to school, of they were walking in a field, of they were grazing their flocks ... They are men, women, and children--innocent and anonymous victims of cruel armed conflicts that sowed terror and left a macabre wake even after the signing of peace accords and armistices. They are lives torn apart by hundreds of thousands of mines, the cheapest and apparently least significant weapons of war.

Armed with a camera, Spanish photo-journalist Gervasio Sánchez has been documenting the stories of victims for fifteen years, following the lives of these men and women as part of an awareness-raising crusade. When he first met them, they had only recently been released from the clutches of death--alive but disfigured, or blind, or missing a limb. He took their pictures then, but caught up with them again years later and found them embracing life, thanks to the help of many, including the Organization of American States (OAS).

Vidas Minadas: Diez Años Después (Mined Lives: Ten Years Later) is an exhibit of Sánchez's work and it is here now at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, thanks to the support of the Embassy of Spain. The exhibit, which shows between November 19, 2010 and January 2, 2011, calls the international community to action on the issue of anti-personnel landmines, a subject the OAS has been working on for twenty years.

Vidas Minadas: Diez Años Después goes beyond statistics and numbers to portray and remember the victims of landmines. Their faces, rendered in black and white, each have a name and a story, and the images denounce the horror even as they make a call to hope and to action. Thanks to Sánchez's camera, we know that Manuel Orellana from El Salvador has had a successful rehabilitation after losing both his legs, that he is continuing with his life, and that his four children live today in a mine-free nation. We also learn that Mónica, with the help of many, is studying Braille after being blinded by shrapnel.

In 1991, only a few...