MARK BRECKE
Mark Brecke is a photographer and filmmaker who has been documenting war, ethnic conflict and genocide covering over ten years and three continents in some of the most troubled regions of the world including Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan, West Bank, and Iraq.
Emerging from the late ‘80s experimental film community in San Francisco, he studied cinema with Phil Green (apprentice of Ansel Adams and assistant to Dorothea Lange), and continued his studies at UC Berkeley with the found footage experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin.
In 2004, Amnesty International selected Brecke’s experimental documentary film “War as a Second Language” to be included in their permanent film archive.
Since returning from Darfur in December of 2004, he has been touring with his images of the Sudan crisis and has given over 60 lectures and slide presentations. He has spoken at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, UCLA School of Law, Brown University, the Fletcher School at Tufts University and the World Affairs Council, and has been featured on Current TV, NPR and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.
Brecke’s most recent documentary film They Turned Our Deserts Into Fire (release date Fall of 2006) captures AMTRAK passengers’ reactions to photos and stories from Darfur while traveling from San Francisco to Washington D.C., in order to give his Darfur presentation to members of Congress in July, 2005.
In 2006 the U.S. Senate selected ten of Brecke’s Darfur photographs to be hung in the Russell Rotunda of the U.S. Capital building in Washington D.C.