Land makes people into who they are. Of that I am sure. If they lose it, they forfeit their solvency and a little bit of their souls, which they will spend the rest of their lives trying to regain.
This extract is from Larry Towell’s book The World from my Front Porch (2008). Like many of his Magnum colleagues, on his field trips he too met and photographed people who had lost their home and their homeland. People who, for political or economic reasons, were obliged to leave their country, were forced into exile by war or natural disasters, and who possessed only the little they could carry. Some sought asylum in the West, others ended up in refugee camps or tried in vain to return to their own countries.
The exhibition Uprooted, eschews any form of historical, chronological or geographical order. The aim is to visualize the sheer number of international conflicts which have occurred since the Second World War, and the resultant masses of exiles and refugees. Similar in their fate, interchangeable in their columns, the refugees progress towards an uncertain future, uprooted, homeless, unwanted.
Exhibition produced by Magnum Photos and Perspektivet Museum
