The Power of Faces: Looking at the Global Refugee Crisis

How do you address the Global Refugee Crisis? Documentary photographers and independent humanitarian advocates Daniel Farber Huang and Theresa Menders start one face at a time.

The Power of Faces portrait project intentionally crops out the context of refugee camps to focus on individuals, and not merely their label as "refugees". The Power of Faces is a global refugee portrait project to raise awareness of what the United Nations calls "the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time." Led by Daniel Farber Huang and Theresa Menders, The Power of Faces seeks to add constructively to the conversation on who or "what" a refugee is.

In this poignant, visually-stunning photography book, Huang and Menders show displaced people with their inherent beauty, courage, dignity, and grace. Importantly, The Power of Faces also captures the on-the-ground, oftentimes harsh reality that refugees face every day, further amplifying the value of recognizing individuals for who they are and not what they may be labeled. Huang and Menders have documented the plight of refugees in Greece, Bangladesh, Mexico, and the Ukraine border.

Huang and Menders recognize that no single perspective can capture or encapsulate the global refugee crisis and The Power of Faces book includes first-person accounts and essays from knowledgeable people who raise awareness, provide on-the-ground relief, and mobilize resources to help some of the most vulnerable populations around the world.

With The Power of Faces, Huang and Menders not only "take" photos but also give printed portraits to the individuals. While traveling the globe documenting the global refugee crisis, the husband-and-wife photography team realized that most refugees and displaced people had lost all their personal possessions when they fled their homelands, including treasured family photographs. Having a printed photo of loved ones or friends to hold in one's hands can be a great comfort in times of need, so they bring portable printers into refugee camps and provide photo-quality portraits for people to keep. To date, the Power of Faces project has distributed thousands of photographs to displaced individuals.

About Daniel Farber Huang and Theresa Menders

Daniel Farber Huang and Theresa Menders have collaborated successfully on numerous documentary photography projects over the last 20 years. As a wife-and-husband team, Theresa and Daniel's collaborative work as documentary photographers is included in the permanent collections of numerous fine art museums and historic institutions across the U.S., including the International Center of Photography, the New York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, Museum of Chinese in America, the New York City Fire Museum, the Smithsonian and other cultural institutions.

They have collaborated on a broad range of issues, with a long-term focus on women's and children's issues and the alleviation of poverty locally and around the world. They have covered these and other current topics in the Republic of Vanuatu, Haiti, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, India, and China.