Elizabeth Herman’s Profile

Elizabeth D. Herman is an independent photographer and researcher currently residing in New York, New York, having just returned from a year in Dhaka, Bangladesh as a Fulbright Fellow researching the political and social influences of narrative construction, focusing specifically on accounts of the Liberation War.  The work developed into two projects - the first an examination of how current political agendas have influenced retellings of the war in national history textbooks over time, and the second a photography and oral history project documenting the lives of women who fought in the Liberation War.  She was recently named a 2011 Finalist of The Aftermath Project for her work on the latter project.

Her examination of women in war is one that extends beyond Bangladesh, first beginning in Vietnam, where Elizabeth spent July 2010 documenting the lives of women who fought for the North Vietnamese Army in the war with the US. In August 2010, she traveled to Texas to find the women they fought against.  The stories heard on both sides offered important insights, not only into the nature of the war, but also into how conflict shaped these women’s lives following the ceasefire. She has now brought ideas provoked by these encounters to this larger, more comprehensive effort in Bangladesh.

Elizabeth recently graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in Political Science and Economics. While at Tufts she completed and received Highest Thesis Honors on her senior honors thesis in Political Science, which examined emerging representations of September 11th, 2001 in secondary school history textbooks worldwide.  Elizabeth has been photographing since high school, where she spent countless hours tucked away in the darkroom.  Since then, she has completed a number of photo essays focusing on various issues of human rights and social justice in Siem Reap, Cambodia, Hue, Vietnam, Ajmer, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as in a number of cities throughout the US.  Elizabeth also runs a small blog that focuses on the importance of narrative and language entitled, The Stories We Tell.  For more of her photography work, please visit her portfolio site, and please contact her with any questions at elizabethdherman (at) gmail (dot) com.