05/12/2013
Standing in the muddy puddle outside the grey sliding gate of the Harmanli refugee camp in southeastern Bulgaria, I couldn’t help but ask myself how many European asylum officials would venture to be in my shoes now.
"I can't let you in. It's a closed facility and nobody has called me about your visit," the policeman shrugs. Minutes later he gets the call -- a local colleague has managed to pull some strings -- and we're in.
Suddenly, it feels as if we've been teleported right into the heart of a war zone. Men scurry for cover between skeletons of buildings, metal containers and khaki tents, wrapped up in blankets against the incessant drizzle (Thank God not shells!) that soon turns into snow.
Children -- many barefoot – wade through the freezing mud or try to keep warm by open fires and improvised stoves outside the tents, their eyes sore from the choking smoke that pervades the whole place.
(AFP Photo / Nikolay Doychinov)
Women do dishes in buckets outside, or drink tea from emptied glass jars, seated on soaked old mattresses or directly on the ground.
The 1,200 people here are all asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan. They paid thousands of US dollars to smugglers and braved a dangerous illegal crossing over the border from Turkey into Bulgaria with the hope of finding a safe haven in a European state.
Instead, they found themselves crammed into this deserted former army camp, under conditions that a visiting UNHCR official said "did not take an expert to qualify as inhumane."
"I had house, car... But no life in Syria for us. Bombs falling. Go outside house, don't know if you come back alive at all," says 35-year-old Abdul Alghni, a lawyer from Aleppo, fighting for the right words in English.
(AFP Photo / Nikolay Doychinov)
He tells me how he paid $300 per person to get smuggled over the border from Turkey with his wife and two small children -- aged one and two.
"Twelve hours," he says, gesturing to show me that they crossed on foot, carrying the children.
"Here so bad. Government forgot me here with my family," he adds, pointing to the rows of metal containers where his family lives together with several hundred others.
Then adds with a shrug: "Me better, there is people in tents."
"Come, come," he beckons, and we jump across the streams of rainwater running down the main alley to a decrepit building to the left.
Inside, smoke is everywhere. It seems as though the very air itself has been painted grey. Lines of yellowish bed sheets divide the two big ground floor halls into dozens of three-by-three-metre boxes -- each shared by a family.
(AFP Photo / Nikolay Doychinov)
Men smoke and warm their hands on the improvised stove -- made from a tin barrel. Women go back and forth between the halls and the six toilets and eight showers, carrying half-naked toddlers. Laundry hangs to dry any place possible.
Something bumps my leg. I look down and my gaze is met by the sparkling dark eyes of a small girl looking up at me. I smile at her and she winks back.
A bunch of men from Afghanistan crowd around me, asking who I am. None, except one teenager, speak English so all conversation with the group goes through him.
"My baby has bronchitis," 32-year-old Siawash Askary from Herat says, hugging a three-month-old boy, wrapped up in a pink-and-blue blanket. The baby’s face looks pale bluish -- I catch myself gazing at it to make sure he’s breathing.
(AFP Photo / Nikolay Doychinov)
"It's very cold, we have no money and no food. All babies are sick. We never imagined what we'll find here. If I knew I would never come," Siawash says.
"But in Istanbul everybody said that Bulgaria is good, that the border is open if you want to go to Europe," he adds.
"We want documents so that we can go to Germany but there is no attention for Afghanis, only Syrians," the men fume.
A young woman comes up to me, asking in English: "Can I speak to you?"
"I heard them saying bad things about Syrians. This is not true. It's the same for everybody," she says.
"Look, we share everything with them," a Syrian man adds, showing me lists of names detailing who got toilet paper, soap or any other basic necessity – all of which come from donations.
The appalling conditions here are too much for me already. I don't want to be turned into some kind of referee between two warring camps of refugees.
"Can you help me with translation, please? I want to go to the tents," I ask the man.
"Sure. Sure," he beckons and we're back outside in the rain, jumping puddles to reach the lines of khaki military tents at the back of the courtyard.
"Come," he waves and we walk on wooden planks that lead the way through the mud to a tent. There is the same stove made from a big bucket burning inside, next to seven beds lined up one against the other. Laundry hangs everywhere.
(AFP Photo / Nikolay Doychinov)
A man, two women and four children nod at me to come in, pointing to a bed next to the stove, as they sit on the other beds and a mattress on the ground.
"I used to be a driver in Damascus. But we could not stay there after the war. We went back to our town of Qamishli," 48-year-old Abd Aljalil Bonja tells me through my new translator.
I had met with Syrians from Qamishli in a camp outside Sofia and I knew that they were Kurdish and ran from an area where Al-Qaeda linked groups performed a series of kidnappings of the local population for ransom.
"We had problems with the Muslims. My brother works for the UN. The Muslims kidnapped and killed his son. We were scared. The Muslims told us 'If you stay here, we'll kill you," Abd says, smoking a cigarette.
He and his wife and four children -- aged 4, 14, 20 and 22 -- crossed the whole of Turkey and paid $2,500 to come to Bulgaria.
"We are Kurdish. We were afraid to stay in Turkey. If you are Kurdish in Turkey, you have a problem," he says, hinting at Turkey's complicated domestic politics -- the separatist Turkish PKK Kurdistan Workers' Party has been fighting the Turkish government for decades.
(AFP Photo / Nikolay Doychinov)
The women step into the conversation, muttering things to Abd, who then bombards me with a torrent of statements and questions:
"We thought Bulgaria was Europe. A normal country like Germany, France, Italy... But it's different."
"You can see for yourself -- the rain is coming down through the tent. And now it's snowing."
"Let me ask you something: 'If you had a dog, would you keep it here?'"
"The Bulgarian government is not doing anything for us. Nobody has come to ask how we are doing, do we need anything. It's a European country but there is no respect."
"The EU said they'll help, we heard. But nothing has changed. Does a child have to die for them to do something?"
"You know what. If it snows like that, I'll just pack my bags and go. I don't care if the policemen stop me or kill me."
We leave the tent and are out in the rain again, making our way back to the entrance among the rows of tents.
Shouts of "Rasheed! Rasheed!" are heard from a group of men and women, lining up the stairs of a nearby building.
"They are asking me if I knew what's going on in there. Somebody told them that whoever has a medical problem has to come here. Other people say it's for the fingerprints. Do you know?" my translator -- the Rasheed they're calling -- asks me.
No, I can't help.
There does not seem to be a soul inside the building and the door is locked.
"Bashar Assad good. Bulgaria no good," a man shouts, summing up the general despair.
The lack of any information for progress on their refugee status claims spreads all kinds of rumours among the people in the camp.
(AFP Photo / Nikolay Doychinov)
"There was this guy who used to be here, but paid money to a lawyer and called from Germany two weeks later." "If you can pay the authorities, you get the papers." "If only we could get outside and go to Sofia. They say it's quicker there."
The excruciating truth is that it is not. Overwhelmed by the influx of more than 11,100 refugees so far this year, the government in the EU's poorest country would be unable to offer them tangibly better accommodation, or speed up the processing of claims enough to be felt by these people anywhere in the next weeks or months.
"I am sorry to tell you that but it's the same everywhere about the documents. It's just slow. At least they said they'll soon move the people from the tents," I tell Rasheed on the way back.
It dawns on me that this 35-year-old man -- dressed in a thin jacket and a dripping baseball cap -- saved my story today by translating back and forth between me and dozens of Syrian refugees who only spoke Arabic, writing down their names in upper case in my notebook.
And I never asked anything about him.
"Rasheed, you also come from nearby Qamishli, right?"
"Yes."
"What did you do for a living?"
"I was a tourist guide in Damascus. Almost like here."
"Did you come here alone?"
"Yes."
"Did you leave a family there?"
"Yes. My father, who was too old to travel."
"Have you heard from him?"
"No. I don't know anything about him. I tried to call but the lines were cut."
His eyes shine back at me and I am sure it's not the rain.
"You are important, you know. You are like a spokesperson for everyone here," I utter sheepishly. "Thank you for helping me. I hope things change for the better."
I ask him where he lives. "The tents?"
He nods back.
Short of words, I leave him and the rest to battle their new war for life all by themselves, feeling guilty for the whole European Union -- the same one that is based on fundamental rights such as dignity, liberty, solidarity.
(AFP Photo / Nikolay Doychinov)
http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/?post/Let-them-come-to-Harmanli-refugee-camp
03/12/2013
The first ever major London exhibition of work by British Photographer, Tony Ray-Jones (1941-1972) will open at Media Space on 21 September 2013. The exhibition will feature over 100 works drawn from the Tony Ray-Jones archive at the National Media Museum alongside 50 rarely seen early black and white photographs, The Non-Conformists, by Martin Parr (1952).
©Tony Ray-Jones
Between 1966 and 1969 Tony Ray-Jones created a body of photographic work documenting English customs and identity. Humorous yet melancholy, these photographs were a departure from anything else being produced at the time. They quickly attracted the attention of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London where they were exhibited in 1969. Tragically, in 1972, Ray-Jones died from Leukaemia aged just 30. However, his short but prolific career had a lasting influence on the development of British photography from the 1970s through to the present.
In 1970, Martin Parr, a photography student at Manchester Polytechnic, had been introduced to Ray-Jones. Inspired by him, Parr produced The Non-Conformists, shot in black and white in Hebden Bridge and the surrounding Calder Valley. This project started within two years of Ray-Jones death and demonstrates his legacy and influence.
The exhibition will draw from the Tony Ray-Jones archive, held by the National Media Museum. Around 50 vintage prints will be on display alongside an equal number of photographs which have never previously been printed. Martin Parr has been invited to select these new works from the 2700 contact sheets and negatives in the archive. Shown alongside these are Parr’s early black and white work, unfamiliar to many, which has only ever previously been exhibited in Hebden Bridge itself and at Camerawork Gallery, London in 1981.
Tony Ray-Jones was born in Somerset in 1941. He studied graphic design at the London School of Printing before leaving the UK in 1961 to study on a scholarship at Yale University in Connecticut, US. He followed this with a year long stay in New York during which he attended classes by the influential art director Alexey Brodovitch, and became friends with photographers Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand. In 1966 he returned to find a Britain still divided by class and tradition. A Day Off- An English Journal, a collection of photographs he took between 1967-1970 was published posthumously in 1974 and in 2004 the National Media Museum held a major exhibition, A Gentle Madness: The Photographs of Tony Ray-Jones.
Martin Parr was born in Epsom, Surry in 1952. He graduated from Manchester Polytechnic in 1974 and moved to Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, where he established the ‘Albert Street Workshop’, a hub for artistic activity in the town. Fascinated by the variety of non-conformist chapels and the communities he encountered in the town he produced The Non-Conformists. In 1984 Parr began to work in colour and his breakthrough publication The Last Resort was published in 1986. A Magnum photographer, Parr is now an internationally renowned photographer, filmmaker, collector and curator, best-known for his highly saturated colour photographs critiquing modern life.
Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr will run at Media Space, Science Museum from 21 September 2013 – 16 March 2014. The exhibition will then be on display at the National Media Museum from 22 March – 29 June 2014. The exhibition is curated by Greg Hobson, curator of Photographs at the National Media Museum, and Martin Parr has been invited to select works from the Tony Ray-Jones archives.
Greg Hobson, curator of Photographs at the National Media Museum says, ‘The combination of Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones’s work will allow the viewer to trace an important trajectory through the history of British photography, and present new
ways of thinking about photographic histories through creative use of our collections.’
Martin Parr says, ‘Tony Ray-Jones’ pictures were about England. They had that contrast, that seedy eccentricity, but they showed it in a very subtle way. They have an ambiguity, a visual anarchy. They showed me what was possible.’
Media Space is a collaboration between the Science Museum (London) and the National Media Museum (Bradford). Media Space will showcase the National Photography Collection of the National Media Museum through a series of exhibitions. Alongside this, photographers, artists and the creative industries will respond to the wider collections of the Science Museum Group to explore visual media, technology and science.
The Principal Founding Major Donors and drive behind Media Space are Michael and Jane Wilson; Founder Donor is the Dana and Albert R Broccoli Foundation and the Principal Founding Sponsor of Media Space is Virgin Media. Media Space has also received generous support in the form of donations or artworks from a large number of individuals, companies and artists.
© Martin Parr
For further press information and images please contact Eleanor Macnair, Press Office, 020 7 942 4357, [email protected]
Science Museum Visitor Information
Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2DD
Open daily 10.00 to 18.00, except 24-26 December.
0870 870 4868 | sciencemuseum.org.uk
facebook.com/sciencemuseumlondon | @sciencemuseum
02/12/2013
On 9 December 2013, join us for CULTURE IN ACTION with world-renowned photojournalist and 2013 Prince Claus Laureate Lu Guang. Lu’s unsettling photos expose the human cost of rapid industrialisation, AIDs stigmatisation and addiction in China. Lu will give a lecture about his approach to photography, followed by an analysis of his work by curator Robert Pledge. China expert, Sinologist and journalist Ardi Bouwers will then conduct a joint interview with both guests.
© Lu Guang
Reserve your seats for CULTURE IN ACTION WITH LU GUANG: 19:00 on 9 December 2013 at the University of Amsterdam. (English spoken.)
Lu Guang’s stunning photographs expose the downside of China’s rapid economic growth and the impact of industrialisation on both the environment and society. Lu has also been internationally recognised for his photos of the AIDS villages in Henan Province, addicts living along the Sino-Burmese border and the SARS epidemic. His work has had a major impact on public opinion and has repeatedly influenced government policy. International recognition includes the World Press Photo Award, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund prize, the National Geographic Photography grant, and a 2013 Prince Claus Award.
Robert Pledge has curated major photographic exhibitions internationally and sat on prestigious juries, notably the World Press Photo Foundation and the W. Eugene Smith Grant. He has edited numerous acclaimed books including Red-Color News Soldier (Phaidon) with Chinese photographer Li Zhensheng.
Reservations
Culture in Action: Prince Claus Awards Week
During the week of 9 December 2013, the Prince Claus Fund in collaboration with De Balie, the Stedelijk Museum and the University of Amsterdam organise ‘Culture in Action: Prince Claus Awards Week’. For the first time ever, on the occasion of the 2013 Prince Claus Awards, all 11 Prince Claus Laureates will be present in Amsterdam. Culture in Action presents a unique opportunity to meet these ground-breaking artists and thinkers from all over the world. The laureates are honoured for their outstanding achievements in the field of culture and development and the positive effect of their work on the development of their countries.
http://bit.ly/18hhgCU (Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development)
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