From the Publisher

By Elizabeth P. Valk

WHEN WE SET OUT TO ILLUSTRATE A PIECE ON DOMESTIC violence, our picture editors immediately turned to photographer Donna Ferrato. For the past decade, she has focused her energy and camera on the intimate brutalities that shatter the lives of so many American women and children. Says senior editor Nancy Gibbs, who wrote this week's cover story: "It may be that her wrenching photographs have done more to raise awareness than any legal or political debate ever could."

It's no surprise that Ferrato ended up combining camera and caring. She grew up in Lorain, Ohio, the daughter of a surgical-nurse mother and a doctor father, who was also a dedicated shutterbug obsessed with documenting the everyday life of Donna and her two brothers. Donna's early photographs reflected that peaceful, loving experience, as she concentrated on recording ) the gentle moments of private lives -- Parisians buying loaves of bread, Colorado cowboys and their dogs tooling around in pickup trucks. "I've always been attracted to the good things in people," says Ferrato, 43, "the funny, the quirky and most of all the love."

Ironically, she was doing a pictorial essay on love when she encountered a terrifying scene. "I was living with a wealthy Westchester couple, and one night I was awakened by noise," recalls Ferrato. "I grabbed my camera and ran down the hall to find them arguing in their bathroom." As she snapped off a picture, the husband struck his wife. When Ferrato grabbed his arm, he shook her off. " 'She's my wife,' he said, 'and I'm going to teach her a lesson.' He wasn't concerned that I was there. That's true of a lot of these men. They're not ashamed of what they're doing. They feel above the law." Shocked and confused, Donna threw the roll of film into a drawer, trying to deny that the beating had occurred. When she finally developed the film months later and looked at the pictures, she resolved never to be silent again. "I realized I couldn't be an accomplice."

Instead, Ferrato has become a determined witness, riding in police cars, visiting hospital emergency rooms, living in women's shelters and prisons. Her book, Living with the Enemy (Aperture; 1991), is a chilling dispatch from the front lines of domestic warfare. Ferrato is battling abuse in other ways as well. She founded the Domestic Abuse Awareness Project to educate the public and raise funds for shelters. "I won't stop until women and children feel safe," says Ferrato. Another measure of her dedication: she paid $4,000 at a recent charity auction for the opportunity to have tea later this month with a woman she hopes will support the cause: Hillary Clinton.