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THEY FLED FOR FREEDOM.
THEY’RE STILL FINDING A HOME.

June 19, 2021

PHOTOGRAPH BY YOUSIF AL SHEWAILI/WITNESS CHANGE FOR OSF

By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences

This year’s U.N. World Refugee Day coincides with Father’s Day, and today’s newsletter examines the experiences of people seeking to restore the idea of home and, farther down, people searching for strong male role models and exemplars of fatherhood.

This photo project—40 refugee storytellers creating images and stories of 1,000 refugees themselves—gives an inside look at people often viewed at a distance. For photographer Robin Hammond, who helped coordinate the project, it’s an extension of his portraits of “New Europeans” that he did for National Geographic—and an opportunity to combat stereotypes of traumatized, helpless, disturbed victims.

To be a refugee means exiting one life and entering another. “You walk through a cut border fence into statelessness, vulnerability, dependency, and invisibility,” Nat Geo Explorer Paul Salopek once wrote.

But that’s not the full story. Above, asylum-seeker and onetime successful businessman Basel Watti escaped a death sentence by Syria’s dictatorship, fleeing to Turkey and eventually to the Greek island of Lesbos. The dictatorship took his business; his family remained behind. “I am just living in the hope that I can meet them again,” he says.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NOUR JARROUJ/WITNESS CHANGE FOR OSF; RIGHT: PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRZA DURAKOVIC/WITNESS CHANGE FOR OSF

From Britain to Hong Kong: Freedom means different things to different people. To Leticia, a Ugandan asylum-seeker pictured at left with Immaculate, it means getting status in Britain and getting a house together. Leticia had to flee Uganda after a public beating for being intimate with another woman. In Britain, she says, “you can kiss on the street, which you can't do back home.” At right, LK, a pro-democracy activist, fled her native Hong Kong for France. She ultimately hopes that Hong Kong will be liberated from China’s increasingly heavy-handed authoritarian rule.

LEFT: PHOTOGRAPH BY NOUR JARROUJ/WITNESS CHANGE FOR OSF; RIGHT: PHOTOGRAPH BY ZAHRA MOJAHED/WITNESS CHANGE FOR OSF

Acceptance: At left, Quassi is seeking asylum in London, after living in a place “that persecutes people who are different and not just for them being gay, bisexual, or non-binary.” The queer Jordanian-Palestinian has faced many obstacles, but “I guess self-acceptance was the biggest challenge.” At right, Roghaia Mohammadi fled her native Afghanistan to “experience a peaceful, war-free life and get ahead by working hard and studying.” These days, in Greece with two of her three children, Roghaia Mohammadi says she had become stronger, but her thoughts go toward the son who was separated from her in Iran. “I am physically here, but my soul was left in Iran.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALI JEHAD/WITNESS CHANGE FOR OSF

Ownership: “My dream is I have my own shop,” says Khashayar Parnoon, an Iranian refugee working as a tattoo artist in Sweden. Khashayar left Iran over three years ago—and his family. Prayer is helping him deal with the losses and focus on his dream, he says.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

First dates, again: New York City is pulsing back to life, and the New York Times commissioned 15 young photographers to show its reenergizing effect on younger people. Throughout May, they fanned out among the city’s boroughs to cover proms, protests, block parties, and more. “It really felt and still feels like a fever dream,” one of the photographers, 18-year-old Nadine Zhan, told the Times.

That hungry seagull: A decade-old photo of a seabird devouring a fry has become key to a Google advertising drive. The tech giant licensed the photo from hobbyist Hannah Huxford, who took it with an iPhone 3 during a dinner with her husband in 2011. She dug it up earlier this year to post on her Instagram, where Google found it, PetaPixel reports.

Icons: From Robert Johnson to Billie Ellish, the images of musicians have influenced American culture as well as their music. A new series beginning next month on PBS showcases live rock concert photography, images from music outlets, and covers of music collections. Icon: Music Through the Lens begins July 16. See the trailer.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik: How did a culture clash at an English B&B lead to Homer Sykes’s best photograph? “I got speaking to the landlady,” said Sykes, who was on the road with the British punk band Sigue Sigue Sputnik in 1986. “I was kind of just hanging around when two members of the band, Neal X and Yana YaYa, came down to order drinks. The landlady hadn’t seen them at this point … and she hadn’t seen their hair.” Just catch this image from the Guardian.

INSTAGRAM OF THE DAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY WALÉ OYÉJIDÉ, @IKIREJONES

Riding through the streets: If you've never heard the echoing of galloping hooves down a narrow street in West Philadelphia, Walé Oyéjidé has news for you. “You have never heard poetry,” says this photographer, filmmaker, designer, and Nat Geo Explorer. His portrait of Ellis "El-Dog" Ferrell of Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club is framed by three of the many young people he has trained to ride. The three young people, Oyéjidé tells us, “race past me on horseback. Black hoodies. Black boots. Backs straight, but heads tilted back. With wild laughter pouring from their throats like a Coltrane solo.”

Oyéjidé was also awarded a National Geographic Society COVID-19 Emergency Fund grant to continue work on his "Love in Isolation" project.

THE BIG TAKEAWAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSUÉ RIVAS

Role models: Photographer Josué Rivas didn’t know his father well when, as a seven-year-old, he was left with in his dad’s care by his mom, who left Mexico to head to the United States for work. Rivas’s alcoholic father, also a photographer, didn’t know how to be a dad—and eventually abandoned him. Last year, after his father’s death, Rivas sought to profile how Indigenous men became good fathers. Above, Rivas photographs Manuel Lieras, who is Navajo and Comanche, playing with his daughters at a park in Oakland.

IN A FEW WORDS

QUOTE

The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms, and the skirt
whirled In the ochre light
of an early June evening.
And I knew then
that I would have to live,
And go on living.

Jane Kenyon

Poet, 1947-1995

From Evening Sun

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On Monday, Debra Adams Simmons covers the latest in history. If you don't get the daily newsletter, sign up here for Robert Kunzig on the environment, Victoria Jaggard on science, George Stone on travel, Rachael Bale on animal and wildlife news, and Rachel Buchholz on families and kids.

THE LAST GLIMPSE

PHOTOGRAPH BY RONALD H. COHN, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION

Corn shucking: In China’s “solar valley,” where panels pepper rooftops through homes and factories, photographer Michael Yamashita captured these people shucking corn in the streets of Dezhou. Yamashita was on assignment for a 2013 magazine article on the Grand Canal connecting Beijing and Hangzhou, says Sara Manco, senior photo archivist for the National Geographic Society.

SEE MORE VINTAGE PHOTOS

This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard and Monica Williams, and Jen Tse selected the photographs. Amanda Williams-Bryant, Rita Spinks, Alec Egamov, Heather Kim, and Jeremy Brandt-Vorel also contributed this week. Have an idea or a link? We’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for reading!

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