IN the beach resort of Pattaya, Thailand, men arrive by the planeload to have sex with exotic others. These “others” are women and children, from impoverished rural communities or neighboring countries, who fall prey to traffickers. They are lured in by promises of a good job, education and a better life only to discover there is no bright future ahead of them, only desperate circumstances. Sex tourists tend to rationalize their actions because the women are not of their own socioeconomic and cultural milieus. “Why is it they are not seeing their own daughter or sister or cousin or mother or wife in those people,” asks Arlington-based photographer Kay Chernush, who has documented human trafficking since 2005.

   An assignment with the U.S. Department of State first exposed Ms. Chernush to the horrors of human trafficking, from slave labor to forced prostitution. Even though she had lived in India, Spain and France, and had worked throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia, she had no idea the extent of this problem. The fact that this criminal enterprise exists in some form in virtually every country and is a growth industry, ranking third after drug trafficking and arms smuggling, came as a shock. “What’s so horrific and insidious about trafficking is that it feeds on what makes us most human,” she says. “We all want to improve our lives and we trust, and the traffickers exactly attack at those points.”

   She first traveled to Hong Kong, India, Italy, Macau and Thailand, where she photographed harrowing scenes like families trapped in bonded labor because of past debt and runaways and illegal migrants exploited in workshops and industries far from their home. “The subject really grabbed me — the dedication of the people who are fighting (human trafficking) was striking, but also the incredible resilience of the survivors of trafficking.”

   Images from her journeys, on loan from the World Bank, will be on view in the exhibit Bought and Sold: Faces of Modern Day Slavery at the Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University through March 27. The pictorial essay addresses sex trafficking, sex tourism and labor exploitation, as well as people at risk and the educational and counseling initiatives made by non-governmental organizations to help them. Ms. Chernush hopes the exhibit will convey that there are no easy solutions when it comes to human trafficking, and that rescue alone is not enough. A panel discussion, followed by a public reception, will be held Feb. 24 at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs to address the complex issues surrounding modern day slavery.

   Ms. Chernush has 25 years of experience in commercial and fine art photography and has photographed more than 50 feature stories for Smithsonian Magazine. Her work has also been featured in other esteemed publications including Gourmet, The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Money and Time. Ms. Chernush decided to change the focus of her work after she recovered from breast cancer, which led to her human trafficking assignment in 2005. “I just decided that after that illness I wanted to shift gears and use my photography in a different way,” says Ms. Chernush, who has been cancer free for five years.

   In 2006, Ms. Chernush took on an assignment in Ghana with the International Cocoa Initiative, an organization whose mission is to eliminate child labor in the cocoa harvest industry. Due to its efforts, a law was passed in Ghana that deems any labor that takes a child out of school as exploitative. In villages like Acheasawa, where Ms. Chernush photographed children performing dramas onstage to teach about the dangers of child labor, the organization has set community action plans in motion. “It’s a participatory plan that involves everybody in the village,” she says. “It raises awareness for them, then they create their own healing dynamic.” Other NGOs work with children enslaved in fisheries in Ghana, children who Ms. Chernush also photographed in her travels.

   More recently, Ms. Chernush visited Brazil to photograph landless, enslaved laborers in the charcoal industry deep in the Amazon. She has also worked with survivors of sex trafficking in places like Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her photographs are an attempt to put a human face on the statistics and headlines, to tell the stories of modern-day enslavement and the journey toward freedom.

   ”I think it’s easy for us, given our privileged lives, to read the paper with our cup of coffee and sort of be horrified by certain items that you see, but then you turn to the next thing — carpool for the kids or school studies or whatever it is. I mean, it’s very hard to really understand what’s underneath that. I think a lot of our attitudes toward this issue are based on our inability to really put ourselves in the other person’s shoes.”

   Victims are taken out of their comfort zone by traffickers and often don’t speak the language of the new country they become enslaved in. “We tend to say, ‘Well why don’t they just go to the police’ or ‘Why don’t they run away,’ but that ignores the real human complexity of the issues,” Ms. Chernush says. While some people are kidnapped, others go willingly under false pretenses and then their identity papers are confiscated once they arrive. “Since when is it a crime to be naive, or gullible or stupid?” she asks.

   Other images show parents in search of their stolen children from Europe, Africa and India. Ms. Chernush captured a Nepalese farmer reuniting with his teenage daughter, who had been trafficked into a Mumbai brothel. She and a friend had been lured away from their village at about 15 years old. The farmer father wrote to a rescue foundation pleading for help and raised money so he could travel to Mumbai to find them. His daughter and nine others were rescued from the cramped crawlspace of a brothel during a raid the night before the photo was taken. Her friend was not found — another photo shows the mother’s agony, as she clutches a picture of her daughter during happier times. “The whole gamut of human emotions plays out before you,” Ms. Chernush says. “It’s very powerful and heart wrenching.”

   A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and recipient of a Fulbright grant to India, Ms. Chernush started out as a Peace Corps writer and employee with the United States Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C. During a severe drought in West Africa, she was sent on assignment to cover the efforts of Peace Corps volunteers. The only catch was she had to bring back photographs to run with her story. “I wanted very badly to go on assignment so I said, ‘No problem, I’m a confident amateur,’” Ms. Chernush recalls. “To tell the truth, I really didn’t know how to load a camera at that stage.”

   She knew how to learn, however, so she invited a well-known photographer to lunch at the National Press Club, took notes and set out on her mission. The shooting conditions were difficult and technically challenging, with the harsh desert light and the contrast of the dark-skinned natives with the mostly white volunteers. Nonetheless, Ms. Chernush became hooked on photography and spent all of her free time indulging in her newfound hobby. After a six-year transitional period, she gave up her cushy government job to pursue photography full time.

   Her array of freelance assignments over the years have included photographing chip-makers at Intel in California, shipbreakers in Paskistan, cheese artisans in France, gem miners in Sri Lanka and bio-medical researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland. “People often say, ‘What do you shoot?’ I say, ‘The bad, the hideous and the invisible.’” She finds subjects like toxic waste cleanups, dynamite blasts in rock quarries and the making of machinery intriguing and beautiful.

   ”I feel very fortunate in having been able to do something I love so much,” she says. “And I feel like my camera gave me entrée into worlds I never would have been in contact with.”

Bought and Sold: Faces of Modern Day Slavery will be on view at the Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, through March 27. A panel discussion will be held at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Bowl 016, Robertson Hall, Feb. 24, 4:30 p.m., followed by a public reception in the Bernstein Gallery, 6 p.m.; (609) 497-2441; wws.princeton.edu/bernstein