Violence Unmasked -- Photographer Captures Images Of Abuse For Everyone To See

Official opening: Reception honoring Donna Ferrato's photographs, Tuesday, 6:30 to 9 p.m. Hosted by KING-TV anchor Jean Enersen; the Pat Graney Dance Company will perform. Also, panel discussion featuring Ferrato and local domestic violence experts, Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. Open to public, free. -- Where: 1001 Fourth Avenue Plaza Building atrium. -- Tickets: $36; for reservations cal 783-4520 by 5 p.m. Monday.

If, as a survivor of domestic abuse once explained, "secrecy is one of the foundations of abuse," then documentary photographer Donna Ferrato is a bulldozer with a camera intent on knocking that foundation down.

Ferrato is a New Yorker with a delicate demeanor and a little-girl voice who's built a huge reputation with her pioneering, award-winning photos of family violence.

Forty of those photos, from her book "Living With the Enemy," are on display through Feb. 27 in the lobby of the 1001 Fourth Avenue Plaza Building. It is the exhibit's Seattle debut, sponsored by New Beginnings, a local shelter for battered women and their children.

"We feel really passionate in being able to bring it (the exhibit) to Seattle," says Marcie Summers, executive director of New Beginnings. "Seeing just one photo, and seeing the pain and terror there . . . people aren't going to be able to turn a blind eye."

When Ferrato's book was published in November 1991, The Washington Post called her photographs "a new kind of work: journalism focused on intimate domestic affairs; combat photography in the home."

Indeed, her images reveal women like Rita, her nose broken, her eyes blackened. Rita was young and had a jealous husband and two little kids who depended on her night nursing job to support them.

Rita's husband accused her of having an affair when she was supposed to be working. So he called her at the hospital. She was always there. One morning when she came home at 7 o'clock he beat her in front of the children. Ferrato captured the damage, including eyes cherry-red from the blows.

She also captured Rita's despair. Although her family urged her to stay in the marriage, Rita had decided to leave - and never trust a man again.

Other visions: a hospitalized woman wearing a neck brace after her boyfriend intentionally ran over her with his truck. Still, she couldn't believe he didn't love her. A little boy angrily arming himself with a plastic knife and plastic gun; he's going to defend his mommy from his daddy.

There's the image of the fearful woman escorting police out her door after she's been beaten yet again by her husband. With quiet desperation she's telling the officers to remember they've been there; next time they're called she says she'll be dead.

Other photos show defiant men, tearful men, handcuffed men, men in batterer's groups trying to get help to stop the hurting. In the accompanying text, Ferrato writes that "there is a myth that domestic violence is `mutual' and that countless `battered husbands' are beaten by their wives. But the fact is that men commit at least 95 percent of all assaults."

Every 15 seconds in the U.S. a woman is beaten by her partner or ex-partner, and this causes women more injuries than auto accidents, rapes and muggings combined.

Domestic assault is also the greatest cause of women being murdered; these deaths occur most often as she's trying to leave.

In an interview before her Seattle visit, Ferrato said she gets "no pleasure out of seeing women and children suffering and men being violent. What I get excited about is seeing people make changes with their lives, and I think the photographs can help people change.

"It becomes a call to action."

But one that Ferrato almost didn't answer.

As the product of a nonviolent Ohio family, she was working on a photo assignment about a seemingly ideal couple when she unexpectedly saw - and photographed - the man violently assault his wife. He showed no fear of Ferrato's camera, declaring bluntly, "She's my wife, and I'm going to teach her a lesson."

"It was so horrific that I kept thinking it had to be an aberration," the photographer recalls. "I never thought a woman could be in that much danger in her own home. But when you start thinking like that - that home can be the scariest place - then you start re-evaluating."

That incident happened in 1981 and once Ferrato stopped denying the reality of what she saw, it changed the course of her career.

She began living in women's shelters, photographing the terrified women and children she met there. She moved in with families struggling with abuse. She visited prisons, hospitals; she rode with the police, always shooting what she saw.

For years, no magazines or publishers would publish her work. Editors, usually male, told her domestic violence wasn't a big story. They told her no one would want to see such depressing pictures. And they invariably praised her photos.

Then two things happened. The surgeon general at the time, C. Everett Koop, declared domestic violence a public-health crisis, and Ferrato began winning photo contests.

A nonprofit publishing house, Aperture, eagerly brought out "Living With the Enemy." And just last month, Ferrato's shots were displayed in a Time magazine cover story on women who fight back from abuse. Said the senior editor who worked on the project: "It may be that her wrenching photographs have done more to raise awareness than any legal or political debate ever could."

Now Ferrato has two focuses.

One is to continue advocating for more effective ways to protect women and to deal with the men who batter them. "Who knows," she says, "maybe in the next five years we'll be able to scale back on shelters and institute detention homes for men who are abusive."

A second goal is to influence Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom she recently met. Ferrato says she found the first lady not well informed about family violence.

So now Ferrato's aim is to take photos that will show Clinton the connection between abuse and other social problems like homelessness, drug addiction and teen runaways. "All these things come from growing up in violent homes."

Children play a lot on Ferrato's mind and in her photography. Often her images show children who've so suppressed their emotions that their eyes are blank.

But make no mistake about it, "the children are the worst victims; they don't have a future growing up like this," she says.

Accompanying her photos on exhibit here are drawings and stories by children who've stayed at New Beginnings shelter. In their words and images are Ferrato's proof.