Inside Lighting Photography Non Profit Has Syrian Refugees Take Pictures

Sevilay Maria van Dorst relies on pictures from around the globe. But this year, she found that despite all of the pictures coming from the refugee crisis in Europe, she did not feel as though she had a grasp of what was found there. “I honestly wasn’t sure what to think,” van Dorst, 32, says. “I believed, You know everything? I’m going to see for myself what is going on. “

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So in February, van Dorst packed her bags and left her home to get Lesvos, Greece in Amsterdam, an island widely regarded as a ground zero . (Roughly 30,000 migrants came in there in February alone.) She made her way. “In a minute, I knew things were worse than I had ever expected,” she states. “You notice their fear and a complete lack of understanding to what is going to happen. They have been moving to smuggler, treated like another amount and creatures from smuggler. But when I looked into their eyes, then I realized they’d families names, hopes, and fantasies. I believed, Oh, my God, you are not out of a different world. You are me, and I’m you. “

“When I looked into their eyes, I realized they’d names, families, hopes, and fantasies.”

Moved to aid van Dorst began teaching English throughout the camp’s chain-link fence to a number of the kids, with flip cards. (She had not obtained permission to work in the camp.) She had a couple of pupils on the first day. Finally, the English classes evolved into photography lessons. “I am a photographer and an artist, therefore I always look for solutions through art,” says van Dorst. Soon, she’d met with Oliver Zimmermann two musicians and Sebastian Gil Miranda, who traveled to watch the catastrophe for themselves. Together, Inside moderate, they founded together with a translator, Amir Asadi, who had come as a refugee in Iran to Greece, a project to educate refugees photography as a means of boosting their sin.

Van Dorst teaches families English throughout the fencing in Moria refugee camp, May 2016

On the next seven months, the Inside Light crew told the pupils, ages 9 to 16, to take photos of beautiful things and handed cameras. “They see this location in a really negative way, but once we ask them to look for things that are special, they start to realize their environment differently,” van Dorst explains. “You start to stimulate positive thinking instead of, Oh, this is really terrible.” After the kids stopped shooting, while offering basic suggestions on light, makeup, and other methods, their pictures were developed by the photographers at a neighborhood store and returned to speak about their favorite snaps. But in return, the kids shared stories about their lives back home. “It is remarkable to me how these refugees do not have anything, but nevertheless want to give you some thing, to teach you anything about themselves or their states,” van Dorst states. So far, more than 50 kids have been worked with by Interior Light; it has launched a fundraising campaign, and plans to expand in Greece and elsewhere the next year.

Van Dorst occasionally shocks. Once was so excited about a film he’d taken that he pushed against . When he finally put it down, van Dorst understood he’d taken a selfie. “Can it be a mistake?” She asked. “No,” he responded. “It isn’t a mistake–I am beautiful.” The response made van Dorst speechless: “To understand that he’d felt so unlikable since his father left and to then watch him call himself beautiful told me I had done my job.”

To find out more or to donate, visit ngotiator.org/product/donation.

This article appears in the December issue of Marie Claire, on newsstands November 15.

source http://www.visagesphotography.co.uk/inside-lighting-photography-non-profit-has-syrian-refugees-take-pictures/