Migrant Photography: I am Sorry

Reuters won Pulitzer for photography of migrant crisis. Till here it is just a another piece of news, but then you contemplate the photos and it becomes more than just news: it becomes tragedy. Human failure has a name, it has a face, it has a life of its own that transcends national borders and dwarfs whatever discourse no matter how elegantly put. I am ashamed. I am sorry.

A selection of the winning photos:

An overcrowded inflatable boat with Syrian refugees drifts in the Aegean sea between Turkey and Greece after its motor broke down off the Greek island of Kos, August 11, 2015. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

A Syrian refugee holding a baby in a life tube swims towards the shore after their dinghy deflated some 100m away before reaching the Greek island of Lesbos, September 13, 2015. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

Syrian migrants cross under a fence as they enter Hungary at the border with Serbia, near Roszke, August 27, 2015. REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo

Migrants and refugees beg Macedonian policemen to allow passage to cross the border from Greece into Macedonia during a rainstorm, near the Greek village of Idomeni, September 10, 2015. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

Hungarian policemen stand over a family of immigrants who threw themselves onto the track before they were detained at a railway station in the town of Bicske, Hungary, September 3, 2015. REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh

Syrian refugees walk through the mud as they cross the border from Greece into Macedonia, near the Greek village of Idomeni, September 10, 2015. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis

 

 

IONIA: THE FIRST PHYSICISTS

“It all started with the mass migration of Greeks early in the first millennium B.C., when they left their homeland in mainland Greece and migrated eastward across the Aegean, settling on the coast of Asia Minor and its offshore islands. Three Greek tribes e involved in this migration –the Aeolians to the north, the Ionians in the center, and the Dorians in the south- and together they produced the first flowering of Greek culture. The Aeolians gave birth to the lyric poet Sappho; the Ionians to Homer and the natural philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes; and the Dorians to Herodotus, the “Father of History.”

The Ionians ended up with the best location in Asia Minor and the Ionian colonies soon organized themselves into a confederation called the Dodecapolis.

Miletus greatly surpassed all of the other Ionian cities in its maritime ventures and commerce, founding its first colonies in the eighth century B.C. on the shores on the Black Sea. During the next two centuries Miletus was far more active in colonization than any other city-state in the Greek world, founding a total of thirty cities around the Black Sea. Miletus also had a trading station at Naucratis, the Greek emporium on the Nile delta founded circa 650 B.C. Meanwhile other Greek cities had established colonies around the western shores of the Mediterranean, the densest region of settlement being in southern Italy and Sicily, which became known as Magna Graecia, or Great Greece.

The far-ranging maritime activities of the Milesians brought them into contact with older and more advanced civilizations in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt, from which the Greeks returned with ideas as well as goods. Herodotus writes that “the Egyptians by their study of astronomy discovered the solar year and were the first to divide it into twelve parts –and in my opinion their method of calculation is better than the Greek.

The trade routes of the Milesians also took them to Mesopotamia where they probably acquired the knowledge of astronomy they needed for celestial navigation and timekeeping. They obtained the gnomon, or shadow maker, in Mesopotamia, according to Herodotus, who says that knowledge of the sundial and the gnomon and the twelve divisions of the day came into Greece from Babylon.

The Ionian Greeks soon progressed far beyond their predecessors intellectually, particularly in Miletus, which in the last quarter of the sixth century B.C. gave birth to the first three philosophers of nature. Aristotle referred to them physikoi, or phyicists, from the Greek physis, meaning “nature” in its widest sense, contrasting them with earlier theologi, or theologians, for they were the first who tried to explain phenomena on natural rather than supernatural grounds.”

Excerpt from Aladdin’s Lamp by John Freely

Palmyra: Terrorists as un-civilizing agents

One photo really is worth a thousand words and, at times, a thousand tears.‎

In an article published today by Spain’s El País (International), the photographer Joseph Eid holds a photo of the ‎great Arch of Triumph of Palmyra taken back in 14 March 2014 against the very same ‎landscape today. Daesh (aka ISIS) has been systematically destroying and looting Syrian and Iraqi sites, ‎and the aforementioned 3rd century Arch of Triumph is no exception: it was destroyed in the ‎‎2015 offensive. ‎

Photos like this bring to mind memories of destroyed heritage sites in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere in the Middle East; an eerie reminder of a human condition that could be described borrowing Kundera’s words: ‘the unbearable ‎lightness of being’. These images leave me feeling an emptiness as profound as the void left by the ‎dynamited Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan; a pain exceeded only by the daily news about ‎refugees and migrants fleeing for their life and risking it all because they have nothing left to lose.‎

You can watch more photos here.

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