Rohingya

Many of the Rohingya refugee children I worked with in Malaysia had never been photographed in earnest. Their self-representation is often the product of the bureaucracy that comes with being a refugee; many of these standard photographic portraits usually taken for documentation purposes bear the scars of neglected objects. By enlarging these portraits, I hope to reveal the hidden material history of a refugee’s journey.

Photographs can also be steely mirrors for the exterior world that reduces the representation of a complex subject such as the Rohingya refugee crisis into simple truths. How do we restore the agency of the subject in the photograph? How do we reveal their stories which are often not physically manifest and thus un-photographable?

These were questions which weighed heavily on my mind as I sought to rebalance the narrative of the Rohingya refugee to one that was more personal, more ephemeral and thus more open to discussion.

Instead of conducting interviews and scribbling captions underneath the photographs I found, I asked the children to draw whatever they wanted. Whether these were figments of their imagination or real experiences, I wanted them to feel involved in their own story.

These drawings also felt more truthful and more revealing than any text I could have written up. An inverted flag underlines how questions of nationality and belonging weighs heavily on the minds of these children. While a body in a pool of blood makes visible latent traumas. The concept of the double exposure has a long history in photography; I’m interested in using a double exposure which combines the photograph and the drawing in order to represent the exterior and interior world on the same plane.