Dario Mitidieri: Children of Bombay

In one of the most powerful pieces of documentary photography in the 1990's Dario Mitidieri portrayed the children who live on the streets and railway stations of Bombay, following the grant of a W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award for Humanistic Photography. Having invested the time to obtain the childrens' trust, he was able to become part of their lives for a while. He recorded both the hope and the despair of the abandoned, ignored, abused, exploited children whose heroism is their day to day struggle for survival on the streets of one of the worlds most competitive mega-cities. Like much powerful documentary work, these images are both aesthetic and heart-rending.

Dario Mitidieri was born in Italy in 1959. In 1981, he moved to London, where he studied photojournalism at the London College of Printing. He started to work as a freelance photographer for the Independent magazine and the Sunday Telegraph in 1986 and since then his work has been published and exhibited world-wide. He has covered some major photographic assignments such as the plight of the Kampuchean refugees in Thailand, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Germany's unification, the Cyclone in Bangladesh, the fall of the communist regime in Albania, the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque in India and the subsequent communal violence in Bombay, Ayrton Senna's last race in Italy, the refugees in Rwanda, the Kobe earthquake in Japan, Children at War in former Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Angola, Charismatic Evangelism in the U.S.A., England, India and Korea. In 1992, he spent the whole year in Bombay documenting the lives of street children of which resulted in the publication of the book 'Children of Bombay'.