The beauty and the brutality: both sides are represented in “Darfur/Darfur,” a photography exhibit capturing life in western Sudan since the region erupted in conflict four years ago. With less than a year since its formation and another 17 months on its tour schedule, the exhibit already has gained massive international attention. Celebrities and political officials have spoken at its openings. Requests for the installation are pouring in from countries including Canada, England, Italy and Israel. In January, it became the first exhibit on the Darfur crisis displayed on the African continent.

“Darfur/Darfur” is the brainchild of one woman, 42-year-old architect and new mother Leslie Thomas. Feeding her infant son while surfing the Internet one night in July 2006, she followed a link in a New York Times article to view images of Darfur. The photos, taken by former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle, included one of a baby girl shot in the back while her mother ran from the Janjaweed, a group of Sudanese militiamen. 

“I was blown away by the number of children who’ve been killed,” Thomas said. As she noted in a press release from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where the exhibit was featured in November 2006: “Once you see photos of a murdered 3-year-old little boy whose face has been smashed or the body of a 1-year-old girl who has been shot, you cannot honestly look at your own children without doing something to stop this killing.”

Teaming up with friends and family, Thomas took action, beginning by cold-calling the photographers who’d witnessed the devastation firsthand. Inspired by childhood museum trips to see photographs by Brett Weston and Ansel Adams, Thomas believed that photographs would have a dramatic public impact. Digitally projecting the images onto a screen or wall would allow them to be viewed on a much larger scale than in a newspaper or on a computer monitor.

“The photos are large-scale because it’s an overwhelming political humanitarian crisis,” Thomas explained, comparing the images’ impact to that of Picasso’s Guernica. “Darfur’s beauty is enormous, but the tragedy is even larger, so the pictures have to be large as well. It’s essential to be shocked.”

The exhibit previewed in September 2006 with a benefit reception at New York’s James Cohan Gallery; Mia Farrow spoke at the event. Though this first showing was at a small, private gallery, its ripple effect was exponentially larger in the museum world. The Holocaust Museum had already been one of the first institutions in the world to declare the Darfur crisis “genocide” in July 2004. In 2006, each night of Thanksgiving week, when Washington floods with tourists, the museum presented “Darfur/Darfur” in a landmark installation: It was the first time that images were projected onto the museum’s exterior, confronting thousands of passersby with images looming nearly 40 feet high.

“In conceiving of [the Holocaust Museum], Elie Wiesel said, ‘A memorial unresponsive to the future would violate the memory of the past,’” noted Sara J. Bloomfield, director. She said the museum seized the opportunity to display the images outdoors, “not inside the museum, which makes them kind of precious, object-like things. They are a statement about why this museum even exists. Its very walls must speak—not to those who choose to come inside, but to the world.”

Through the Washington event, the Cape Town Holocaust Centre in South Africa learned of the exhibit. The sole museum of its kind in Africa, the center “contextualizes the Holocaust within the South African experience of apartheid as a crime against humanity,” explained Director Richard Freeman. “We consider it our responsibility to create awareness of human rights abuses of this magnitude.”

“Darfur/Darfur” opened at the Holocaust Centre in January, with the photos displayed as a backdrop to the “Witnessing Darfur” exhibit created by the United Kingdom-based organization Aegis Trust. In South Africa, “There is very little knowledge [about the crisis] and hence few people have any opinion or point of view apart from a general response for suffering to stop,” Freeman said, noting that no other African countries had yet expressed an interest in mounting the exhibit. “We are hoping that it will have major impact.”

Similar hopes are held at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum, Idaho, where “Darfur/Darfur” will open in March before traveling on to Nashville and Boston throughout the spring. Ketchum is a small, sophisticated community, said Artistic Director Kristin Poole, but without a university nearby, there are limited opportunities for a deep exploration of this kind of subject matter. More and more, the museum has been trying to compensate for this lack.

“Our hope is to bring an opportunity forward for the community to understand more deeply what’s happening in Darfur,” she said. “We’re an arts organization, but we always have had humanities as part of our mission. This is an essential humanitarian mission.”

There’s little money in the “Darfur/Darfur” project for Thomas and her supporters. Though the exhibit has a sponsor, the nonprofit organization Global Grassroots, fund-raising is slow going—especially because the exhibit is offered to museums at no cost besides a small travel stipend to allow the crew to attend openings. Instead, Thomas says the exhibit’s biggest accomplishment has been raising awareness.

“We’re shocked by how much media we’ve gotten,” she said, remarking on the dozens of media outlets and television cameras that appeared at the Holocaust Museum’s display. “We’ve learned that if you show pictures large enough and make it a media event, you can get attention for your cause.”

But though worldwide interest in the exhibit continues to swell, those involved with “Darfur/Darfur” hope the need for it ends as quickly as possible. “Hopefully one day we won’t have to tell these stories,” Steidle said. “We’re trying to work our way out of a job.”