European Mediterranean Migrant Crisis through the lenses of the photographers - Alina Reyzelman

European Mediterranean Migrant Crisis through the lenses of the photographers

 Over 1600 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean when their boats capsized on its way from Africa to Italy. On April 12, and April 19th two separate shipwrecks in the Mediterranean caused what’s being called one of the worst migrant and refugee crises in two generations.

On April 23rd, 2015, European leaders formed summit in Brussels to discuss the crisis and look for solutions. According to Time magazine: «aid organizations and humanitarian officials said Europe is still “lagging far behind” of what’s realistically needed to ease the tragedy».

Lucia De Stefani, a contributor to TIME LightBox is showing how How Photographers Are Trying to Put a Face on Europe’s Migrant Crisis.

The journalist reports: «The crisis along the Mediterranean’s coastlines, from Libya to Morocco and Greece to Italy, is not new. Photographers have worked over the last decade to raise awareness as conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Africa have displaced millions.» Italian photographer Massimo Sestini aboard a helicopter took a very special shot, it showed one boat with hundreds of people looking up, waving their arms. “You could see their desperation,” Sestini said in 2014. “And, concurrently, their happiness at being saved.” The photograph won a World Press Photo award and was named by Time one of the Top 10 images of 2014.

Olivier Jobard, a French photographer followed one refugee’s trek to France. “What’s bothering me when we’re talking about immigration is that we often associate these people with ghosts and shadows,” he says. “They are not human in our minds.”

Another photographer Daniel Etter from Germany says that “The only way to really tell the story is to spend time with refugees in their home countries, see how they live, learn why they leave and then just go with them on their way.”

lampedusa-shipwreck-mediterranean-sea-01In October, 2014 Italian photographer Francesco Zizola dived 59 meters to photograph the wreckage of a boat that had carried some 500 people, and now rests at the bottom of the Mediterranean. He sought to convey the vastness of the tragedy that had occurred one year before, when 360 people lost their lives.

“I wanted to show to everybody that our comfortable, bourgeois homes could turn as if in a nightmare into that cabin with the red curtain, which I photographed inside the sunken ship,” he says. “That cabin is the tomb of our collective conscience and a memento of our indifference.”

 

Read full article at http://time.com/3832806/europe-migrant-crisis-photography/