TOKYO-2017 Editorial / General News

Being born in a refugee camp

  • Prize
    Silver in Editorial/General News
  • Photographer
    Eduardo Lopez Moreno

This project seeks to give voice and presence to people who are often spectral identities who live without dialogue, without answers to their questions, and without a clear future. Their realities are not ephemeral, but only detached from our lives. The refugee camps contain diverse stories that were born in different countries and contexts and intersect in the common areas of these places: markets, primary school and streets; stories that in their plurality create a certain connection, a new sense. The Refugee Camps in the lands of nobody subsist with actions that are untiringly repeated, creating a constant that we do not perceive. These Camps have populations of the size of intermediate cities of the world. Pictures of people that are forced to look for spaces in other paths and light in other ways and by doing so leave behind other paths and other dreams. This is a documentary visual study of the refugee camps that are home today of more than 67 m. forcibly displaced people worldwide. The images are a journey into the interior of the refugees’ space and life. It is an attempt to build a story without affection. The images aim to reunite us with the common man, using a simple visual grammar that reveals the value of the everyday hidden life. I want to present images that are the time of the people and also the people in their time – a complicated time for refugees. This is a testimony without performance, as a visual archive of uses and customs, and ways of being and living. Photos that make visible people, things and moments that are almost trivial and insignificant acts, but to which a new meaning is provided. Images such as the ones that I submit have a random component, yet they contain artistic intentions and the search for the day-to-day aesthetics. I want to do a visual reconfiguration of these camps and turn it into something more than a repertoire. As part of this project, I plan to travel to various Refugee Camps to take pictures that are sensitive to the context, but are also the context themselves.

I am an architect, with a master in sociology and PhD in urban geography. I studied photography nearly 40 years ago. I am preparing a book of photography entitled “Streets of the World and Their People” with short narratives accompanying the photos. I am a social photographer. ( I like to travel and meet the world with its streets and its people, but the part that responds to my interest, my vision and philosophy of life. These images are a look at someone's world, a journey into their space and their life; an attempt to build a a story without affection, but part of a social commitment.