Darren Ell Photography

After filing a photo essay on the living conditions in the Idomeni refugee camp near the Macedonian border for the Montréal Métro newspaper, and aware that the mainstream media had been inundated with traditional documentary images of the migrant crisis in Europe, I began making photographs that were more contemplative and evocative, more personal and less generic. I left people out of these images to allow the viewer to ask questions, to imagine the plight of the refugees using the clues and traces appearing in the landscape. In Surviving Refuge, I use photographs of objects, spaces, as well as continuous and disconnected landscapes from northern Greece and the island of Lesbos to address some of the themes and contrasts I saw in the refugee crisis: the pain of loss, emptiness and absence from leaving behind one’s family and homeland; the abandonment and rejection, even violence, the refugees were facing in Europe; the disappointed dream of refuge and freedom which became a reality of survival and enclosure; and finally, the continued scattering of bodies from one land to another.