photography

The refugee and migrant crisis has been going on for many years without Europe having found answers to this humanitarian crisis. In 2010 I visited Athens for the Red Cross to focus on the chaos that prevailed in Greece. In practice, the asylum system was broken down and refugees lived in poverty in the streets, in crowded apartments and in camps on the islands. People slept outside a police station and tried every day to submit their asylum applications. People stood in long queues outside places where food was being distributed. A mother with her young children had been sent back from Denmark with reference to the Dublin regulation and lived on some mattresses in a corner of a crowded apartment ...

On a journey for the Red Cross, I visited a refugee camp in Lithuania. In practice, the camp was a prison containing many nationalities. Pakistanis, who drove the time playing cricket, Afghans, a Russian woman who wanted to go to the United States with her daughter ... The physical conditions of the camp - the rooms, the beds, the bathing conditions - were not humane and during our visit there was trouble between the residents and the guards encouraged by our visit from outside in this time wastage, which seemed isolated and forgotten by the outside world. Refugee Camp, Lithuania, 1998.

Refugees from the war in Kosevo seeking shelter in an abandoned tobacco factory outside the town Shkoder in northern Albania, 1999.

In may 1991 I was in Kassala in Sudan near the border to Eritrea photographing refugees from Eritrea in The Wad Sharifey Camp. Soon after fighting broke out in Eritrea between Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and Ethiopian government soldiers. The dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam had fled Ethiopia and his regime had collapsed. Thousands of government soldiers fled over the border into the semi desert land between Tessenei and Kassala, dehydrated in the heat and with many wounded. Many died before help slowly started to arrive. Warning: strong images.

Demonstrations and first elections in may 1990. In May 1990, the University Square in Bucharest was filled with protesters. The first free elections were on the stairs and the hope of a new life freed from Ceauşescu and communism was alive. A democratic revolution. I photographed the election in a small rural town near Bucharest, I forgot its name. The election brought Ion Iliescu to power by overwhelming majority. Since then he has been charged with crimes against humanity by being responsible for the lives of hundreds of people who died in connection with the Romanian revolution. He himself belonged to the political elite under Ceauşescu and has since been accused of enriching people from the old regime, among others persons from the secret police Securitate. So maybe the Democratic Revolution was nothing more than a palace coup. Today, despite membership of the EU, Romania remains one of Europe's poorest and most corrupt countries.