By Giles Duley
All photos: Giles Duley/UNHCR
THERE is no such thing as truth in photography. As soon as I enter a room, I choose to point my camera in a certain direction, and when I press the shutter, I have decided on that moment at the exclusion of all others. So how can there be a truth in that?
With the refugee crisis, there can be no definitive moment, no single image that tells all. The refugee crisis is a million stories woven together into a tapestry that reads differently depending on where you stand. And I think it’s important that we see it that way; its complex, its multi-layered and we have to avoid the trap of bundling this into one story and one truth. In doing so, we don’t do justice to those whose lives are caught up in this crisis.
In late December 2015, Idomeni, the border crossing between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia (FYRM), was closed. Over 2,000 refugees, asylum seekers and migrants found their route ahead blocked. Tensions were rising as people grew more desperate. Finally there was a confrontation between those trying to cross and the police who blocked their route. Rocks were thrown, teargas fired. As protestors pushed against the fences, the world’s press was there to capture the drama.
Yet this represented fewer than 200 people in a camp of over 2000. The majority were themselves taking shelter in makeshift tents. As the riots started, I sat in a tent drinking tea with a Yemeni family who were terrified of the rioters and, throughout the night, as I wandered around the camp, families approached me asking for safety from the violence.
Of course the next day the papers were full of photos of the riot, with no mention of the majority of the people who’d been forced to shelter from it. What is the truth? The media will always focus on the dramatic, which means we often don’t see
the full picture. For the majority of refugees, their
journey, their story, is never told.
And equally my photographs and work don’t present the truth, but they do attempt to show another side. Away from the dramatic, my work focuses on the banality of everyday life, especially for families stuck in the limbo of camps in Jordan,
Iraq and Lebanon.
When the UNHCR approached me to document refugee stories across Europe and the Middle East, they gave me the greatest brief. It was simple: they asked me to follow my heart. And over the coming seven months, that is what I tried to do.
For over a decade I have documented the effects of war on civilians around the globe. From South Sudan to Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Angola, it is the stories of refugees that have mostly been my focus.
From the start of the conflict in Syria, I have witnessed the growing crisis in Jordan and Lebanon. Yet despite all this, nothing had prepared me for the months on the road and the hundreds of stories I listened to. Travelling to over a dozen countries I got a sense of the enormity of this crisis. Focusing on refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, I saw the effects of decades of war that were creating a diaspora from shattered nations, civilians forced from their homes looking for shelter across the globe.
I have seen war. I have witnessed its effects first-hand and I know why people flee. It’s a simple question to ask, but what would we do in similar circumstances? To see your friends die, your families living in fear, jobs gone, schools closed, hospitals bombed – at what point would you decide to give up and flee? What has always astounded me is not that the refugees I met fled their homes, it’s the fact that they endured so long before doing so.
I can honestly say that throughout this project, I never met one refugee who had a sense of victory that they had made it to Europe, Lebanon or Jordan – a sense of relief maybe, but never jubilation.
Instead, each bore a longing and wish for home. These are people who endured to their limit, and only when all options had gone, they took the hardest decision – to become a refugee.
I can’t tell you what it is like to be a refugee; I can’t speak for the people of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. I can only bear witness. Earlier I said that I question if there is such a thing as truth in photography, and I do doubt that. However, I do believe there can be honesty, honesty in representing what we witness in as balanced a way as we can.
To the best of my abilities I have tried that, for as a photographer I can only tell you what I see.
Extracted from I Can Only Tell You What My Eyes See: Photographs From The Refugee Crisis by Giles Duley, published by Saqi Books, £25. Book sale profits go to the UNHCR – the UN agency that protects the rights and wellbeing of refugees all over the world
About the author
Giles Duley is a world-renowned documentary photographer and humanitarian activist who lost both his legs and one arm while documenting conflict in Afghanistan. The pictures shown here are among a huge array of images in his new book, which includes photographs of refugees in transit and in camp. Of these start individual portraits, Giles Duley has said: "As soon as you photograph somebody standing in a refugee camp, you see them as a refugee. By putting them against a white sheet, it gives you the opportunity to look at them as people. It’s a very naked thing, and quite confrontational in a way; you’re staring at them and they’re staring back at you. I love my white sheet; it’s the best-travelled white sheet in the world."
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