Cesar Dezfuli – Photographer
Cesar Dezfuli
The Passengers project seeks to put face to those who have seen the need to migrate outside the system, analysing the impact that this form of movement has on the identity of migrants.
On 1st August 2016, 118 people were rescued from a rubber boat drifting in the Mediterranean Sea, 20 nautical miles off the Libyan coast. One more of the hundreds of boats that have been rescued from this migratory route in the past years. Only in 2016, 181,436 migrants were rescued safe, while 4,576 lost their lives at sea.
But who is behind these numbers? What is the identity of the victims and survivors of this journey?
In an attempt to put name and face to this reality, I portrayed the 118 people who travelled on board this boat, minutes after their rescue. Their faces, their looks, the marks on their body... reflected the mood and physical state in which they were after a long journey that had already marked their lives forever.
But that would be just the beginning of this investigation project that has continued to evolve since then. I soon realized that in those first portraits they lacked real identity. Those were not themselves, but the result of a long journey during which their identity had been diluted in the mass, sometimes hidden by themselves for fear of the environment, or stolen based on abuses and humiliations.
During the last six years I have worked to locate the 118 of them, today scattered throughout Europe, to understand and document their real identity, with the aim of showing that in those individuals there were latent identities, which only needed a peaceful context to flourish again. To this day, I have met 70 of them, and I have located 105. They currently live in various cities in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Malta, Holland and Switzerland.
‘Passengers’ is ongoing, and the objective is to meet, photograph and interview the pending ‘passengers’, thus completing all the perspectives of those who were part of this journey, so that with all the information collected I can get to spread with guarantees and precision the history of this boat and its ‘protagonists’.
The ultimate goal is that the understanding of the specific stories of this group of people and the details and deepening of information on the reasons that led them to leave their homes, serve to extrapolate these data to all the other people who have faced this reality and to build empathy from society towards those who have find themselves in the need to migrate.
Although ‘Passengers’ has a photographic base, it will be complemented by other materials: maps, handwritten texts by the protagonists of the project, physical objects, video and sound. The objective is to generate enough material to make this a multiplatform project, which can be distributed through the media, through exhibitions and in digital format with a docu-website that is under development. It is an in-depth project, which provides a new narrative regarding the way of documenting migration, and that in its development so far has shown an interest from the public and an impact, that I hope will be enhance once the project is finished.