How do we make sense of Europe’s refugee crisis amid the relentless clamour of Euro-electioneering and a seemingly unending stream of media imagery that inures us to the human suffering and upheaval? Photographer Daniel Castro Garcia and graphic designer Thomas Saxby, who work under the collective pseudonym John Radcliffe Studio, offer one possible answer.
Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-2016 was created, they write, “in response to the imagery used in the media to discuss the issue of migration, which we felt was sensationalist, alarmist and was not giving people the time and consideration they deserved. We wanted to approach the subject from a calmer perspective, using medium format portrait photography as a means of meeting the people at the centre of the crisis face to face.”
To this end, the book’s visual narrative follows the refugee trails from Lampedusa, Italy’s most southerly island, through Sicily and on to Calais, and from Lesbos in Greece. Garcia and Saxby spent several months befriending individual refugees in Lampedusa, which, because of its proximity to Africa, is one of the main starting points of the current migration into Europe. They then spent six weeks in the winter of 2015 driving from Calais to Athens through Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia, all the while making contact with people they had previously met.
The photos they took on their journeys move between portraiture, close-hand observation and a kind of tentative reportage: young men play cards to while away the time in a camp, two children rest on blankets spread across tarpaulin groundsheets, fires burn next to makeshift tents beneath cold, grey skies. Often, the photographs are difficult to read – are the fires part of a protest or just a means of keeping warm? Are the items of clothing spread out on the dusty ground simply drying in the open air or do they symbolically denote something more ominous – the missing or the disappeared? There is something oddly surprising, too, in the group portraits of young men posing uncertainly for the camera, smiling and relaxed, not least because they fracture the dominant media narrative of chaos and suffering, of desperation and struggle. They humanise.
The book design reflects the narratives within: the cover is burgundy-coloured to resemble a European passport, but with the word “Foreigner” printed in gold. Inside, minimally drawn maps trace the journeys across borders, the points of entry that become holding zones.
The crisis, we are often reminded, is the biggest movement of people since the second world war and, in the main, it is a journey from chaos, through extreme danger, into limbo. One memorable image is of a young man standing on an otherwise deserted beach letting a handful of sand slip through his fingers and be carried away on the wind. It speaks of so much: fragility, isolation, determination, fate. Around him there are footprints in the sand, but they suggest someone walking uncertainly and without direction. It is that sort of book: thoughtful, suggestive, haunting and all too human.
Foreigner: Migration into Europe 2015-2016 is published by Mack Books. Click here to order a copy for £35
