Documenting the Displaced
Member and amateur photographer Alex Treves has recorded the plight of refugees across the world for a book to support some of the displaced millions.
India is where my interest in photography really put down roots, and I was able to figure out what I really cared about. And when I came back to Japan...I got in touch with RIJ [Refugees International Japan], and I wanted access to things I couldn’t see otherwise, and I thought they could probably do with some resources.
In November 2014, we went to the Thai-Burmese border...[where] there are 100,000 Karen and Karenni ethnic minority refugees in camps. We went to visit projects supported by RIJ, and aside from anything else, it convinced me that money directed intelligently does make a material difference. It made me more optimistic.
When I came back, I had an exhibition of my India photographs and some pictures from the Thai-Burmese border, and I got in touch with everyone I knew from 20 years in finance…and I made $35,000 for this refugee charity. I had finally found something useful I could do with these pictures, which were otherwise voyeuristic.
There are lots of things refugees want. They want to be treated with dignity and they want recognition…but a lot of it boils down to money, frankly, because that’s how they pay for housing, schooling, clothes or whatever you need.
Last November, I went to Africa with RIJ. We went to Johannesburg, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. And I came back and I had eight photographs and a little paragraph of text with each one, and I e-mailed everyone I knew and received $5,000 over the next five or six weeks for RIJ. That’s not going to change the world, but because I exist in this environment where people can give me this sort of money, that’s a good thing.
There are 60 million refugees worldwide, and it would be amazingly presumptuous of me to claim in one book I can cover all of that. The title of the book is Glimpses over the Edge. One of the things I’m frightened of is heights, and that sense of vertigo I get looking over the edge of a high drop is kind of how I feel when I see how some of these people are living. It’s “glimpses” because I cannot in one book capture everything about the refugee experience.
The second thing to say is that the experience is more diverse than [most people] understand, but within that diversity there are common experiences. So there’s a diversity but commonality.
The third thing I want to achieve is to move away from statistics and show it’s about people, which is why the captions matter so much. Where I’ve got names, I use names and where I’ve got stories, I use stories, and I try to reduce it down to individuals.
[The project] has given me quite a lot of personal fulfillment to have fundraised the way that I have done, and it’s given me a window into other bits of society. And it’s probably made me slightly more realistic about genuine problems that I might have and things that feel like problems but, back in the real world, are nothing.
As told to INTOUCH’s Nick Jones.
July’s connection: David O’Neill
Image Enrique Balducci
