Daniel Blau Gallery: Sofia Valiente - Miracle Village

Sofia Valiente, a photographer came across the community living in Miracle Village when she was photographing the small towns of south Florida. She started visiting the community and began documenting this enclosed world in portraits, landscapes and still lives. Comprising the observed pictures and often painful testimonies, Miracle Village is a beautifully made book. Valiente also includes found photographs and censored letters, personal belongings, religious icons. It is not just a documentary record of a shunned community, but an argument for understanding, rehabilitation, even forgiveness. The Miracle Village community was founded in 2009 by an evangelical Christian pastor, Dick Witherow. Who refers to sex offenders as “modern-day lepers” and sees it as his Christian duty to help rehabilitate them.

Valiente’s book begins with a version of a Biblical quote from Paul 103: “There is no judging, for we who are here have the same name.” There are quite a range of offenders in Miracle Village, from guys who looked at child pornography to an 18-year-old man who had sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend. She wanted the book to reflect all those aspects, but also touch on the wider issues, what society thinks, what the victims think, what the offenders think and what she thinks. Florida has some of the strictest laws governing the sentencing and subsequent monitoring of sex offenders. Many residents of Miracle Village are tagged with ankle monitors, must obey a 7pm curfew and cannot own a laptop or mobile phone. The community is geographically isolated because it has to be: paroled sex offenders are not allowed within 1,000 feet of any building where children gather. It is hard, too, to align the words with the portraits of the men and woman who wrote them but that is another of the tensions at play in this project. Miracle Village is ultimately a document of a profoundly Christian place, where the shunned are offered some chance of belonging, if only among their own. It forces us to ask questions of ourselves: can we, should we, forgive these people.

I find this series of work really interesting, as Valeiente is trying to make people see sex offenders as a group of rehabilitating individuals rather than evil monsters. Her work is really powerful as it's a really hard subject to approach as many people will get really angry about these photographs. Viewers might not want to forgive these sex offenders, especially if they have been victims, you would want them to be punished and have to live with what they had done for the rest of their lives. This like my own work will cause a lot of controversy as it will divide the audience, with my work some people will see it as I'm covering particular religions, compared to what I'm actually trying to cover which is to show how people are effected by the current issues in the news, or if they are at all.