A PORTRAIT OF HELL ON EARTH PHOTO EXHIBIT DOCUMENTS AFRICA'S SUFFERING.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

For the audience at Skirball Cultural Center, a place whose stated mission is to connect Jewish heritage to American democratic ideals, author Samantha Power's words contained shock and sting.

Stop using the phrase ``never again,'' she told the crowd of several hundred there this week. It refers to the way American Jews regard the lessons of the Holocaust. Instead, she said, say, ``Not on my watch!''

``It's the 21st-century version of `never again,' '' said Power, whose ``A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide'' won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. ``You can't really say `never again' anymore because it's so hollow.'' Her point was it did happen again, in Rwanda, and the world couldn't stop it. And it might happen again in Darfur.

You might expect someone at the Skirball to take offense at that. ``Never again'' has attained power and resonance, especially for American Jews, in recent years. But instead, when Power finished speaking, the crowd gave her a standing ovation. She had convinced - as did a new photo exhibition, ``Rwanda: After, Darfur: Now: Photographs by Michal Ronnen Safdie,'' which opened the same night as her talk and is on display through Oct. 1.

Rwanda is where some 800,000 Tutsi tribal members and moderate members of the rival Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu extremists, soldiers, militia members and others during 1994. Darfur, in western Sudan, is where government-supported Arab tribesmen known as ``Janjaweed'' have been killing non-Arab Sudanese in a brutal campaign to suppress a rebellion.

It is estimated that 200,000 have died in Darfur, 2 million have been internally displaced and 220,000 have fled to nearby Chad. The U.S. Congress has declared that this amounts to genocide. The Bush Administration has been trying to find a political solution to end the killing, in part because of organized efforts in the U.S. to not allow Darfur to become the next Rwanda. A 7,000-troop force from the African Union is attempting to maintain a shaky cease-fire.

The speech by the Irish-born Power, who teaches at Harvard University and also does international reporting for The New Yorker, was a call for those present to get involved in such efforts.

Safdie, an Israeli photographer and wife of Skirball architect Moshe Safdie, accompanied her friend Power to Rwanda in 2002 to observe and record the first phase of ``gacaca'' tribunals, citizen-based regional courts for those implicated in participating but not masterminding acts of genocide. These courts emphasize confession and are at least partially designed to help survivors find out what happened to murdered relatives.

And in 2004, she again accompanied Power to the parched, desert region of eastern Chad, where international relief agencies were running the Bahai tent camp as a home for (at the time) 18,000 struggling refugees from Darfur. Many in her photos are women and children -- an ominous indication that the men have been killed.

``I looked around and said, `What does it take for this to be called genocide?' '' an emotional Safdie told the Skirball audience before Power spoke. (Her own mother had survived Nazi concentration camps.) ``In this displacement of people, they're in a place with nothing but sand and sky, nothing to protect them from the 110-degree heat. They're totally dependent on aid agencies to survive.''

Her Darfur photographs, a mixture of color and black-and-white, are less harrowing than her Rwanda ones, which document evidence of mass murder.

Other images are more about loneliness, isolation and despair. And, strangely, beauty. The color photographs, especially, with their horizontal framing and huge expanses of powder-blue sky and brightly sunny sand, show an attractively minimalist desert landscape. Contrasting that is the spectacularly colorful and intricately patterned clothing worn by the refugee women.

The most compelling of the Darfur photos shows two tents side-by-side in the otherwise-barren ground. One, property of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, is well-made, large, sturdy and even sleekly stylish with its gold-brown tint and sturdy ropes and stakes. The other, makeshift and assembled patchwork-like from pieces of fabric, is frayed and has holes in it. Its top is covered in plastic. From a hidden place between the two tents, four children peek out. It's pretty clear evidence of the need for refugee relief.

By contrast, the Rwanda photographs are more immediately emotional. In some, Safdie has photographed the ``inventoried'' remains of victims -- skulls and bones, laid out on tables or piled in sacks. This is grim and solemn, even when -- as in one photo -- soothing light from a crumbling brick wall comes into a room where the sacks are kept.

Safdie said she had a difficult decision while shooting in Rwanda, where she also saw beauty among the people and the landscape. ``Here we were documenting one of the most horrendous events. How were we going to do it?''

That conundrum was resolved when a woman showed her photographs of family members killed during the massacres. Later, after Safdie's visit to Rwanda was finished, the woman sent her a letter with photos of herself and survivors in her care.

`` `I'm terribly sorry all we spoke about while you were here was genocide,' '' Safdie recalled the woman writing.

`` `I want you to see we're doing better now.' ''

These two pictures are among the nearly 40 color and black-and-white images by photographer Michal Ronnen Safdie that make up the exhibit ``Rwanda: After, Darfur: Now,'' on view at the Skirball Cultural Center.

RWANDA: AFTER, DARFUR: NOW

What: Exhibit of photographs by Michal Ronnen Safdie showing recent events in Africa.

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, until 9 p.m. Thursday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: General admission is $8. Call [phone] or visit skirball.org.

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(1 -- 2) These two pictures are among the nearly 40 color and black-and-white images by photographer Michal Ronnen Safdie that make up the exhibit ``Rwanda: After, Darfur: Now,'' on view at the Skirball Cultural Center.