The April 2014 Issue of VICE includes just one article in its 130 pages. The magazine's sole story, “Saving South Sudan,” by Robert Young Pelton, is a gonzo-style dive into the strife of the world's newest nation, one that has faced perpetual war "with some sporadic days off" since 1955.
In April, we received an invitation to a gallery exhibition by New York-based photographer Mike Mellia, whose project, ‘Our Side of The Story: South Sudan,’ is a series of portraits of South Sudanese refugees-turned-artists.
Subjects included supermodels who've walked for the likes of Louis Vuitton and appeared in Kanye West videos, an actor starring in an upcoming Reese Witherspoon movie, and a poet studying at Columbia University.
Almost everyone in the series still has family in South Sudan, or a neighboring refugee camp, and many of the subjects' families don't know the extent of their current artistic lives.
All interviews by Zach Sokol. Photos courtesy of Mike Mellia.''
INSTALLMENTS
Meet Mari Malek, Refugee Turned Supermodel
Meet Amou Ajang, Poet and Student
