Lisa Kristine’s photographs are mesmerising. She has an extraordinary ability to make people look compellingly beautiful – even those who are living as slaves in horrific situations. We meet at the Asia Society, the venue for August’s Thomson Reuters 2017 Anti-Slavery Summit. The first question I ask is, what’s her secret – how does she do it?
“I feel like I arrive to people with an open heart, and that creates a sense of comfort that allows people to show their true, authentic selves to me,” she says. “My aim, always, is to show their dignity. My work is born of trust and intimacy.”

Like most people, Kristine was only dimly aware of the existence of modern slavery. She first learned the true scale of the problem while exhibiting her work at the Vancouver Peace Summit, in 2009. According to the Global Slavery Index, in 2016, about 45.8 million people were trapped in some form of slavery, with 168 million children engaged in labour. There are more enslaved people now than at any time in history.

“When I learned about the modern slave trade it hit me like a freight train,” says the American, who built her career taking photos of remote landscapes and cultures.

“When I was young, my mother had a bookshelf in the corner filled with big books on anthropology and copies of National Geographic,” she says. “I’d sit by myself and leaf through the photos of people covered in mud, and in feathers, and to me they looked like the Earth. From my perspective they seemed anchored, unshakeable. My childhood was quite stressful and they had a solidity that I wanted to have, too. I remember deciding that, when I was older, I would go and meet them.”

Kristine’s quest would take her, and her camera, to more than 100 countries on six continents. She made many visits to nations where slavery thrives, which was why the revelation at the Peace Summit came as such a shock.
“My entire career is based on observing people, and yet I’d totally missed it. So I was completely thrown. I was angry with myself and I couldn’t sleep at night.”

Kristine flew to Los Angeles to meet Peggy Callahan, co-founder of charity Free the Slaves, and offered to help. With the support of the NGO, she spent a year travelling the world, photographing enslaved people. The body of work she produced was published in two books, Slavery (2010) and Bound to Freedom (2017), and shown around the world as the “EnSlaved” photographic exhibition. Kristine’s first knowing encounter with slaves was in the brick kilns of India.