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A Norwegian photographer spent seven years documenting the lives of refugees around the world
One mouse click at a time, on a screen in a semi-crowded room in London, picture after picture unfolded the stories of the world’s displaced.
There was the single mother who escaped violence in Somalia and fled to Yemen to work as a house cleaner. Afraid her three children might get hurt if left alone to play in their fifth-floor one-bedroom home in Sana’a, she chained them to the wall everyday as she left for work.
Then there were the playful, smiling faces of children running barefoot after a football in the freezing Afghan winter.
They had come a long way, like the hundreds of thousands who returned to Afghanistan after 20 years as refugees in Pakistan, only to find themselves displaced again, this time within their own country.
Norwegian photographer Espen Rasmussen started the Transit project seven years ago, following refugees from Sudan’s conflict-stricken Darfur, and others from Somalia, Colombia and Serbia, all searching for a place to call home.
He wanted to tell what he described as a “global story of suffering”, a story that more than 43 million people around the world share.
Certainly, a great amount of suffering was transmitted through his photos, through the faces buried under belongings, as people embarked on endless journeys.
But something else also surfaced. Something that, he said, all those in transit seem to have in common: resilience.
Try and look at them not as victims, Rasmussen told his audience at London’s Frontline club last month, where he presented his latest project.
Because even if they are victims – of war, violence, political persecution, natural disasters and calamities – these people are also incredibly resilient and proud.
They are the ultimate survivors, he said.
“I wanted to look more at how these people live, how they survive. Because it’s a fact most people will survive,” he said.
“They flee and they end up in a camp somewhere but they manage to survive and give their kids food and quite often they manage to get their kids into school as well.”
Over the years that Rasmussen spent travelling with them, he noted there was something else these people shared.
“One big thing these stories have in common is that everybody is talking of going back home,” he said.
“(For example) Somalis, they flee because of conflict and drought and a bad economy, but they all say they want to go back home.”
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