JODI COBB

wfphoto.biz

His story begins with a blurb in the Washington Post about the passage of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000.

Jodi Cobb read it and wondered if any stories had been done on the illegal trade of trafficking humans. She contacted organizations such as The Protection Project affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. She contacted people at the State Department. She read reports issued by committees at the United Nations. She read Kevin Bales’s book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. In the end, she realized there wasn’t a picture story that told the entire truth: 27 million people in the world are slaves.

“I knew it was going to be a very difficult story because it was invisible,” says Cobb who spent a year on the project. She started in India and Nepal, where she felt she could make pictures. There she already knew of brothels where women worked and places that employed children. She had located enslaved families who worked to pay off debts incurred by unfair lending practices.

From there she traveled to nine other countries to photograph as many of the three sides of the nar- rative as she could: the different kinds of enslaved workers, the peo- ple who enslaved them, and the peo- ple who worked to free the slaves.

In Israel she had only four days to work. In Bosnia, she ate lunch with a man known to be very dangerous.

She risked reprisal on the streets of Mumbai for using her camera outside the brothels. She cried sometimes while she worked. “I was either in fear or in tears while I was shooting,” says Cobb.

“It was the worst of human nature—and the best—in that story,” she continues. “For every evil guy there was some brave person trying to help.”

It is safe to say that “21st Century Slaves,” the 24-page story that National Geographic magazine published

in September 2003, is the pinnacle of a career that has blossomed from her early days as a staff photographer at the News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware. After a two-year stint as a freelance photographer, Cobb joined the staff of National Geographic magazine in 1977. Since then she has researched and photographed 25 stories, covering subjects as wide open as “London” or “The Enigma of Beauty.” But she also specializes in opening the doors to closed worlds, as she did in her story “The Women of Saudi Arabia,” or in her highly acclaimed 1995 book, Geisha: The Life, the Voices, the Art.

To learn more, go to www.nationalgeographic.com. Or take a class with Jodi. She regularly teaches at the Photography at the Summit workshop in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.