Correction appended below.

PERPIGNAN, France — An exhibition of Yunghi Kim’s photographs “The Long Road Home in Africa: Famine to Reconciliation 1992-1996” is on display here this month at the Visa Pour l’Image festival.

Yunghi Kim does not regret going to Rwanda 20 years ago, documenting the aftermath of the Hutu extremists’ genocide against Tutsis and the resulting refugee crisis. Hundreds of thousands perished while much of the world did nothing, which makes her angry to this day. It also makes her feel guilty that while she was able to return to her middle-class life, her pictures failed to ease the Rwandans’ plight.

Those feelings rushed back last year as she reviewed her archives, where she could “smell the stench of death” as she pored over old photos.

“I was 32 when I was there and the sheer magnitude of the death and suffering was hard to witness,” Ms. Kim said. “But when you are photographing you are on adrenaline, trying to survive, and in a way protected by your cameras. It is when you are editing photos that it often hurts most.”

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Her work in Rwanda, as well as from Somalia and South Africa, is on exhibit this month at the Visa Pour l’Image festival. Photographs so intimate that you can feel the suffering and pain are balanced by more joyful images that show the dignity and resiliency of the people she encountered.

In Goma, Zaire, she followed one family to illustrate in painfully human terms the plight of almost a million refugees who had gathered in a desert at the base of a volcano without water or much food. As the crisis subsided, hundreds of thousands of the refugees returned, mostly on foot, to their homes in Rwanda. Ms. Kim accompanied a widow and five small children as she walked back to her village and was greeted by her extended family.

Ms. Kim can empathize. Born in South Korea in 1962, she was raised by her grandmother after her parents, both doctors, left the country for better economic opportunities for their family. The South was still recovering from the Korean War, and she vividly recalled poverty and periods without running water.

It would be almost 10 years before her parents — about to be divorced — sent for her. When Ms. Kim moved with her mother to Great Neck on Long Island, she did not know English and it was difficult to adjust to her new home.

“It seemed like I had traveled a century in time,” she said. Feeling very much the outsider, Ms. Kim became a photographer.

After graduating from Boston University in 1984, she worked in Quincy, Mass., before moving to The Boston Globe, where she was a staff photographer for seven years.

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Although she enjoyed daily assignments in Boston, she was asked in 1992 to cover the famine in Somalia. She had never been to Africa or worked overseas.

Expecting to cover a famine, she found herself in a war zone on her first night. She was awakened at 3 a.m. by a heavy firefight, as the town where she was staying was overrun by the Somali warlord Mohammed Said Hersi, known as General Morgan.

Armed men went into the compound where Ms. Kim was staying with the Globe reporter Wil Haygood and Bob Allen, an Australian medic. As Mr. Allen went into the front room with his hands up to see if he could reason with the intruders, the journalists hid in the back on the floor.

Ms. Kim feared she was about to die.

But the medic — who falsely claimed that the journalists knew first aid — convinced the intruders that they could help the rebels. While they bandaged wounded fighters under the medic’s supervision, Ms. Kim took a few photos. Intervention by the United Nations and CARE led to their rescue after 13 hours in captivity, and they were flown to Nairobi, Kenya.

Still, Ms. Kim did not want to return to Boston without documenting the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Somalia. So, four days later, she returned to Somalia — alone, no less.

“That was the turning point in my career; it opened my eyes,” she said. “I did really think I was going to die, but I also realized that I was stronger than I knew and that I had gall.”

She returned to Boston, but not for long. Two months later, she stood on a Mogadishu beach as United States Marines landed.

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CORRECTION: Captions in an earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to the history of the scenes shown in some of the photos from Rwanda. The events in Rwanda in 1994 are considered a genocide, committed by Hutu extremists who targeted Tutsis, not a “civil war.” Approximately 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates were killed.

Ms. Kim’s photographs from 1996 of the refugee crisis in Goma are of Hutus who fled Rwanda as the Genocide was ending.

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