Sudan has been aptly called "a million square miles of suffering." Over the past five years, fine arts photographer James P. Nicholls has risked his life to take a series of remarkable images of the peoples who struggle to survive on the frontlines of Africa's longest civil war.

Nicholls has recently returned from the Sudan with a new body of work that is essentially an extended portrait of the people, sharing with us his experience with these extraordinary people.

The bombings have stopped, peace treaties signed, and through Nicholls' vision and his heart we meet the future of Sudan.

From the villages of the fabled Nuba people of central Sudan to Dinka refugee settlements in northern Bahr al-Ghazal, Nicholls captures something for which many war photographers strive, but few attain: a glimpse, not only of privation, but of the poetry, the beauty, even, of human perseverance.

Earlier photographs that make up Nicholls' larger body of work on the Sudan were taken in 1999, 2000 and 2001. Some of these photographs have appeared on PBS's The News Hour and feature prominently in the documentary film, "The Hidden Gift: War and Faith in Sudan" which premiered last year, along with the photographs, at the US National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Nicholls' remarkable images hold their own against photographic forebears George Rodger (1948) and Leni Riefenstahl (1960s) who captured the gentle Nuba at other critical junctures in their often tragic encounter with modernity. While Nicholls' photographs never lack the lyricism of these earlier essays, they are not nostalgic glimpses of a lost world, but harder-edged portraits of insurgent Nuba and Dinka villagers struggling to defend their religious and cultural identities against the backdrop of genocide and war.

Some of the images in the Sudan portfolio are included in a new book on Sudan titled War and Faith in Sudan.