Book Review: A Dream of Europe
©Jacob Ehrbahn from ‘A Dream of Europe’
Andy Dion: I’m a big fan of your series Headbangers. Your new book is quite different. What started your idea for A Dream of Europe?
Jacob Ehrbahn: It started off in spring 2015. There was a huge news story in Europe about refugees coming from war zones like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. All of a sudden, there were a million people coming to Europe and other countries' systems collapsed because they were overwhelmed with this big pressure. On my first trip, there was a huge boat from Africa, heading for Sicily, which sank. I think it was around 800 people who drowned… that was where it all started for me. We were so far away from the story and normally I'm very close to my subject. It opened my eyes to this refugee story.
©Jacob Ehrbahn from ‘A Dream of Europe’
Andy: One of the silver linings of your work is documenting these locations so consistently over the years. You really do get to see just how changed these institutions can become over the course of a few years.
Jacob: What really struck me was, in 2015, everything was chaos. Nobody expected it to be like that. People lived in very inhuman circumstances. Then you come five years later and it's still like that— nothing really improved. And people stay there. Some of them are told to go out in the jungle to wait for their appointment for their first interview, which is one year away. They have to go with their kids out there and try to survive... Over the period of the six years, one of the most famous, or most infamous, places was the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos. By the fall of 2015, it was one of the five hotspots in Europe but it was only made for up to 3000 people. But over the years, the camp grew outside the fence of the official camp so there were jungle camps cropped up. I was there when it all started. There was a tropical rainstorm for three days and people were outside in the dirt with water coming down. It was like, a really bad situation. I was there in fall of 2020 when the camp burned down. In just five years, it popped up from nothing, and later wiped away from the surface. It’s unreal that this is happening on European soil. As a European, we normally have the understanding that we stand out for humanity, then you go out and witness scenes like this. People are beaten up at borders systematically or pushed back out in the water. There's a missing link between all these incidents and places and the way we see ourselves as humanitarians.
©Jacob Ehrbahn from ‘A Dream of Europe’
Andy: I often see photojournalism referred to as a craft. I'm in the camp that believes photojournalism can be art. Where do you stand in this conversation?
Jacob: I don't think it has to be one of the two things, I think you can combine it. Doing a book is also about having a mixture of pictures that tell a story. When you do a book, it's really different from newspapers because you have 300 pages as opposed to 8. In the book, there are dramatic rising and falling motions like a rollercoaster or a piece of music. That's why it’s not built up chronologically— because it wouldn't work. I have to say, “Oh, I have to spread the drama.” It's an epic ending to show the Moria camp burning down, but I took pictures after that event occurred. A couple of months later, I went back to Bosnia and took more photographs there, but put them into an earlier chapter. Some photographers really want to show off. It's not that I'm against it, but if you have a subject with suffering people, then my role is to be invisible. The photographer should not be in the way. I mean, I stand between the reader and the subject.
©Jacob Ehrbahn from ‘A Dream of Europe’
Andy: I’ve seen you reference moments of peace and stillness within the book. Do you have any particular moment where that clicked for you?
Jacob: Is there any particular moment? You know, there was this picture from before the camp burned down last summer. It was the biggest the camp ever had with up to 20,000 people living there. I had been walking around for a day in this harsh light and I found this little girl sitting in the camp. She was there with her grandparents. Her mother died when she was three months old from a bomb shelling in Aleppo and now she's sitting here in this dump in Europe with her grandparents, suffering from some kind of skin disease. Her father managed to get to Germany. But at that moment, she had been staying there for five months and didn't know if they would be able to go to Germany at all. What’s the most heartbreaking is that, as a parent, I see 40% of the people in these camps are children. It's not so easy being a child under these circumstances and my heart breaks to see it. It's also hard to see other parents put in a situation like this where they cannot provide for their children.
©Jacob Ehrbahn from ‘A Dream of Europe’
Andy: This might be a doozy of a question, but do you believe photography has the power to cause change?
Jacob: No, of course, it’s a standard question. I don't believe photography can change the world, but I believe that it might be able to change somebody’s world a little bit. And that's the whole reason for me to do this book. I want to show others that there's a missing link between how we see ourselves as humanitarians and what is actually happening out there. In the book, I refer to it as diving into a parallel universe to Europe that most people don't see. I see it as my task to kind of fill that gap. I want to show you that behind all these policy decisions are real people. I don't want to tell people... it's not my job to tell people what to think, but I can try to reach for their hearts. Because no matter where you are, no matter who you vote for, I believe that everybody can find some kindness and no matter what, our mission is to try to reach for people's hearts.
