In 1955 a famous photography exhibition opened at MOMA in New York called “The Family of Man”. The FENIX has a space divided into hanging panels displaying 200 enlarged photographs called the Family of Migrants depicting the story of migration. Some of them are recognizable masterworks like Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother escaping the Dust Bowl, and Alfred Stieglitz’s immigrants crammed in steerage. Others are more recent from around the globe. It’s like a Buddhist koan, or Borges short story—there are no more frontiers and yet across every border is another frontier. If you leave everything behind you immediately become a pioneer charting emotional, social, and geographical territory.
Warren-Richardson’s Syrian man passing a baby through a razor-wire fence at the Hungarian border (2015) is, for my taste, one of the great refugee shots of all time.
