Gabriele Cecconi | Lumix Festival für jungen Bildjournalismus

Gabriele Cecconi
The Wretched and The Earth

The Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp: 60-year-old Abdul Salam stands in a hole he has dug for use as a latrine. The huge quantities of garbage that are generated in the camp and cannot be removed are a significant source of disease. In December 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that 88 per cent of the water samples that had been gathered in the camps were contaminated with E. coli bacteria from undisposed sewage.

Rohingya children drink contaminated water from a puddle directly outside the Balukhali refugee camp. When the Rohingya gather wood, they cannot afford to take along a supply of drinking water, so they drink from puddles. The lack and poor quality of the available water are problems that plague the entire region; they are the primary causes of ailments such as diarrhoea and skin diseases.

Marjon, 35, with her two-year-old son Muhammed. Both suffer from acute respiratory infections from inhaling too much smoke. In general, it is women who prepare food in the shelters. They use wood gathered in the forest as fuel, which is particularly dangerous for them, children and elderly people in enclosed spaces.

Rohingya wait for water and food at the distribution centre in the Moynarghona camp. The shortage of land is the main cause of overpopulation in these settlements.

Khotiza Begum, 67, in her new accommodations. She arrived in Bangladesh on 1 September 2017. After only a week, a rampaging elephant destroyed her family’s hut in the camp. Khotiza was seriously injured; her two grandchildren were killed. The Kutupalong megacamp is located directly along a migratory route for Asian elephants. In the first few months of the settlement’s existence, elephants often wandered into the camp. In their panic, they killed or injured many Rohingya.

Several Rohingya have pitched a makeshift tent on a pile of firewood. The deforestation required to build the camps has exposed the earth to dramatic erosion, which increases the risk of landslides.

A lone tree in the middle of a camp. Deforestation and environmental damage in the entire region are drastic. According to the humanitarian Intersector Coordination Group (ISCG), all the forests in Cox’s Bazar will likely be gone soon.

A family waits to be resettled in another area of the camp. The risk of landslide has made their current accommodations too dangerous.

An elephant in its territory – only around ten kilometres from the Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp. In the first months of the crisis, many Rohingya were injured or killed by elephants.

A child climbs out of an enormous well in the Unchiprang refugee camp. This camp, which is home to 22,000 people, suffered a massive shortage of water during the dry season. The well, which was dug in stony subsoil, was built according to a local method in order to access and filter groundwater. After only a week, it had run dry. A school is now to be built on this spot.

A Rohingya woman gathers leaves in the Teknaf Game Reserve. All Rohingya rely on the forest: in the dry season they come every day to gather materials for various purposes. Leaves and roots are used both as fuel and as ingredients in food. A UN report published in September 2018 estimated that the refugees gather nearly 7,000 tonnes of firewood here every month.

Rohingya workers at the end of the morning shift in the Balukhali camp. Hundreds of Rohingya smooth out the hills here every day. Nearly all their huts are located by these hills. With the annual monsoon, thousands of people risk losing their accommodations to landslides.

A group of children play on a landslidden hill in the Musoni camp. There is immense pressure on the local ecosystem in the subregions of Ukhia and Teknaf. Before the exodus, 336,000 people lived in this area; now there are more than a million.

Ziaur Rahaman, 22, in his house in the village of Unchiprang, located just one kilometre from one of the Rohingya refugee camps. All the water in this village is now polluted by the waste water coming from the camps. Ziaur says he is willing to offer a portion of his own land in exchange for the construction of tube wells.

A view of the Kutupalong refugee camp at sunrise. The camp has been here since 1991. Now home to more than 600,000 people, it is the world’s largest refugee camp.

In August 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, fleeing persecution in their home country of Myanmar, streamed into Bangladesh. A million refugees now live in the border district of Cox’s Bazar, which has thus become the world’s largest refugee camp. This picture series shows the environmental consequences of mass flight and presents an ecological dilemma: by vying for the precious few resources that are available, people are burdening the already threatened ecosystem that is meant to provide these resources. Water reserves are decreasing and the Teknaf Wildlife Sanctuary is shrinking even as erosion, landslides and floods in the monsoon season are increasing. Globally and locally, the paradigms for handling international crises must be reconsidered and developed with the holistic employment of practicable solutions. At Cox’s Bazar, a particularly fragile area, the environmental crisis is an acute example of the challenges posed by mass migration.

Bangladesh
Climate
Escape
The Environment

3 Questions

1. The door opener: Can you describe a formative moment in your career as a visual journalist?

After my law degree in 2013 I discovered photography during a road trip with a friend of mine and I decided to quit my lawyer’s career and my master’s degree to dedicate myself to photography. In 2015, I was selected for a 10-day masterclass with Alex Webb and it was the first time I had the chance to confront myself with other young photographers and with a great master. During that experience I’ve started to think seriously about my path and my pictures and I built important friendships that I still have after five years.

2. The decisive moment: When did you first encounter your topic and why did you decide to cover it photographically?

I’ve started to think about my project a few months after the beginning of the Rohingya crisis. I was reading a local newspaper when I saw an interesting article about the environmental impact of the migration on the host environment and the related consequences on the living conditions of the refugees. Nowadays, two of the main global issues are mass migration and environment and Western society has built its bases on the mentality of the domain of nature. Even though in this case refugees had to exploit the local natural resources for their life, I thought that this story could be significant to show how human beings and the environment are indissolubly connected.

3. The future: What could the visual journalism of the future be like?

We are living in the society of the proliferation of images, “the excited society”, using the words of the German philosopher Christoph Türcke. As the number of images has increased enormously I think that the future should be, as never before, conscious of the dynamics of the postmodern society and overcome old and new stereotypes, thinking about the possibilities to go beyond the spectacularisation injected by the power and invasive presence of mass media. Using the symbolic power of the images smartly in the contemporary channels of distribution could help transform the visual shock to a reflective shock and help visual journalism be more conscious. These would become images that give rise to images of thought.

Photographer Gabriele Cecconi speaks about the stories behind the pictures from his project The Wretched and The Earth.

»During that moment, I felt this intimate connection with the subject and I took the picture.«
Gabriele Cecconi

Curated by Lena Wöhler

*1985 in Italy
Gabriele Cecconi did not take up photography until he had completed his studies of law. Since then, he has documented topics of social, political and ecological relevance. In 2015, he participated in a masterclass with Alex Webb. His works have appeared in Italian media such as L’Espresso, Internazionale and La Repubblica, but have also been published in The Caravan and shown internationally at one-man and group exhibitions.

www.gabrielececconi.com
@gabriele.cecconi

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