Paul Hill & Maria Falconer

“Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.” So wrote a female columnist in a British national newspaper in 2015. She was referring to refugees and migrants, who she likened to cockroaches.

Although she was vilified for the comments, it does highlight how refugees are de-personalised and lumped together, whether they are from the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, or whether they have been bombed, threatened with death, made homeless, or are starving. They become The Refugees – anonymous, stereotyped, the ‘them’ to our ‘us.’

We travelled to the Greek island of LesVos to join voluntary groups already helping the hundreds of refugees arriving daily in rubber dinghies, after a perilous journey over the Aegean Sea from Turkey. Later we moved up to the Greek / Macedonian border just before it closed.

Through our photographs, we aim to reflect the anonymity and depersonalisation that is the fate of these individuals and families.