Over the past 10 years, British photojournalist, Alixandra Fazzina has roamed Africa and the Middle East, chronicling the plight of the displaced. In July this year, the UN's High Commission for Refugees gave her the prestigious Nansen Refugee award for her extraordinary images of human suffering and resilience in Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and beyond. (The prize of $100,000 is donated to a cause of the winner's choice.)
In 2006, Fazzina started photographing refugees and migrants from civil war-torn Somalia, the uprooted people who risk all to cross the Gulf of Aden in search of a better life. The two-year project has now been turned into an epic, often sadly beautiful book, A Million Shillings: Escape From Somalia. Fazzina's original idea was to follow a single group of refugees from Somalia to Yemen, but that became untenable when she realised few people reach the other side. As it was, she faced extraordinary risks and came upon dreadful suffering, at one point leaving her camera on a beach to help drag survivors from a boat overloaded with dead bodies.
In his introduction, António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, describes the "conspicuous and gratuitous brutality towards the migrants and refugees making the trip". Torture is common and death – by burning, drowning or shooting – a regular occurrence. "A million shillings is not enough to buy decent treatment for the voyagers," he writes, "but it is enough to sustain impunity for the perpetrators of wholly unnecessary brutality."
A Million Shillings, though, is a book that does not abide by the normal rules of reportage. Its narrative unfolds in an almost novelistic way, as Fazzina's camera tracks a journey that, for the few who survive, often ends in a kind of dismal limbo of uncertainty in a refugee camp in Yemen. Many of Fazzina's images of the everyday life there have an intimate and painterly quality: the muted blues and greens of the clothes, the stoicism of the faces, the abiding sense of futility that attends this kind of survival. Here, the photographs serve the story and you may find yourself lingering, as I did, over her almost holy portraits of the displaced.
Salima (pictured) was 19 when Fazzina met her in Yemen. She had lost her husband and baby son in the war in Mogadishu and was living in a so-called safe house, trying to raise $25 through begging to pay the traffickers who will drive her across the desert to more uncertainty. At night, she passes out on a bare floor and dreams of home.
This is a powerful and moving book that will make you think twice about the meaning of overused, meaningless terms like "refugee" and "asylum seeker".
