After Macedonia built a barbed-wire fence along its border with Greece in November of 2015, refugees in the Greek border town of Idomeni rioted, throwing rocks at police forces and yelling “Open the border!” and “Help please, Germany!”
Photojournalist Nikos Pilos captured the protests in his documentary “Trapped,” one of several award-winning films he has made while covering the current refugee crisis in Europe.
The mass movement of migrants into Europe peaked in 2015, when 1.3 million individuals applied for asylum in the EU, Norway, and Switzerland. In response, European countries such as Austria, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia and Bulgaria have erected at least 800 miles of border fences, according to a USA Today article.
Over 50,000 refugees remain in Greece today, unable to move further into Europe. 16,000 of these refugees are stranded on Greek islands, living in conditions that are, according to the UNHCR, “unfit for human habitation.” An additional 38,000 are on the Greek mainland.
Pilos started photographing refugees in the 1990s, when the fall of multiple communist governments triggered massive migration from Eastern Europe to the West. Over the last three years he has worked on several projects documenting refugees in Greece, first through photography and then moving to video.
In a Skype interview at NYU, Pilos said that he began to shoot video only because the market demanded it. “Still photography is much more powerful than video,” he said. Unlike video, which Pilos says can maximize or minimize an event’s significance, photography captures a scene as it is.
Although all of his work is in black-and-white, Pilos says it is not meant to be artistic. His goal is to document reality as clearly as possible. “I feel very happy and satisfied when the audience understands exactly the situation,” said Pilos.
Pilos said he doesn’t approach a situation with a fixed idea of what the finished story should look like. However, he wants his photos to send “a particular message” and to convey the pain and difficulty of being a refugee. He purposely takes time to speak with the people he photographs.
One of this photo projects, also titled “Trapped,” consisted of a series of diptics, or sets of two photographs placed side-by-side. One of those photos is generally a close-up, while the other captures a wider view. For example, a photo of migrants crossing the Greek-Macedonian is paired with a close-up of the scars on a refugee’s back. Pilos says that diptics create strong emotions in people, and that he has witnessed people crying in front of his pictures. “I believe this works,” he said.
Pilos has been in more than 14 war zones, photographing conflicts in Palestine, the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, as well as uprisings in Turkey and the 2011 humanitarian crisis at the Libya-Tunisia border. His work has been published in the NY Times, TIME, The Guardian and other international media outlets.
His most recent documentary, Dying for Europe, tells the story of a Syrian refugee named Youssef who loses his wife and two of his children when the boat carrying them is shipwrecked on the island of Kos. The 17-minute, three-part film was released at the Thessaloniki Film Festival this past March.
Photo: Camera/PxHere. Filed under CC.
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