A girl’s silhouette gazes at a flock of monarch butterflies, their orange wings vivid against a bleak wintery backdrop. Titled “From Broken Trees,” the piece, featured at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, is a personal favorite of Boulder County-based photographer Dona Laurita.
“The girl actually witnessed some of her family members, her mother and her baby sister, being killed by the Taliban. She’s from Afghanistan,” Laurita said in an interview with the Denver Post. “The stories of such loss and devastation and tragedy for a young person to navigate and then come to a country where they don’t know the language, they’re Muslim, they don’t fit right into a community. Those stories stand out to me.”
For the past year, Laurita has provided a safe space for expression, storytelling and community for young refugees through photographs of their silhouettes.
Boulder County-based photographer Dona Laurita has been photographing silhouettes since 2013. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Dona Laurita)
“When you get to know somebody, we tend to make our own personal assessments about them,” Laurita said. “It’s almost like looking at them in a silhouette form of life. We see an outline of a person, but we don’t know what fills them. We don’t see the color of their lives, their landscapes.”
Titled “The Silhouette Project,” Laurita’s work with shadowy figures blossomed in 2013 when she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a project about bullying at a Denver high school.
“This particular high school was having a problem with bullying,” Laurita said. “How could I come in and work with that issue that they had? So I began with using the silhouette. I wanted to use this metaphor of not being able to judge a book by its cover.”
Now divided into five iterations, “The Silhouette Project” has told the stories of marginalized and vulnerable communities, including immigrants and refugees, for more than a decade.
Inspired by her daughter, who died of brain cancer at 19 years old, much of Laurita’s work focuses on teens and young adults.
“After losing my daughter to cancer in 2019, that age group really speaks to me and my 19-year-old son, because that’s the age, Jules, my daughter, was when she died,” Laurita told The Post.
In the third iteration of her project, “The Silhouette Project: Of Cancer Through the Lens of Love,” Laurita captured the silhouettes and stories of adolescent and young adult cancer patients.
“You know, like how penguins huddle together when it’s really cold?,” Julietta Laurita, Laurita’s daughter, said. “It’s basically really cold when you have a brain tumor. It’s really, really cold, and you have to find people to huddle with.” The quote accompanies her silhouette as part of the “Through the Lens of Love” project.
Dona Laurita created a silhouette photo of her daughter during her “Through the Lens of Love” project in 2018. (Photo credit and copyright: Dona Laurita)
Laurita’s desire to continue her work with adolescents led her to the refugees in Denver South High School’s Newcomer Program, which helps students with little formal education learn English and other academic basics while navigating school in the U.S.
She has spent the last year capturing the stories of around 30 students. Often assisted by translators, Laurita interviews her subjects, discussing their journey and what each photograph should convey.
“I want to create a portal, not only for myself but for the viewers to get to know who these young people are, what they’re facing, how one can help and what we can learn from them,” Laurita said.
She also finds solace in helping the teens navigate the loss of their old life.
“A lot of these young refugees have experienced horrible tragedies and feel very alone,” Laurita said. “I find connecting with them and helping them share their stories so they don’t feel so alone and bearing witness to what they’ve been through helps both my son and I to see how we can find some way to help others through tragedy.”
“The Silhouette Project: Newcomers” is on display at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center until June 22. After this exhibit, Laurita will capture the silhouettes of more newcomers in Boulder and Denver County.
“I would love to do this for the rest of my career,” Laurita said. “I just feel very passionate about helping young people be seen and heard in a creative way and providing a voice for them.”
Eventually, she hopes the project will capture refugee voices from across the nation.
“Newcomers have seen things you would never want to see,” Karen Vittetoe, an English as a Second Language teacher at Denver South, told Laurita during an interview for the project in 2023. “They have scars from blasted glass or fires or untreated childhood diseases. Some have lost babies; some have lost mothers, fathers and friends. Some have seen the eye of a war between a government and its people or between the gangs that rule the streets.
“Some of them come from such beautiful places that you can feel the blue sky and the mountains rising up, taste the crisp air, and engorge your ears with the sounds of people laughing and praying. But those places were taken from them, often so suddenly their families didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to all that beauty.”
IF YOU GO
“The Silhouette Project: Newcomers,” at Colorado Photographic Arts Center, 1200 Lincoln St., Suite 111, until June 22; cpacphoto.org.