Europe’s Migrant Trail, Through the Instagrams of Refugees. Following the “digital breadcrumbs” left by refugees on social media.
The photojournalists who documented the suffering of these refugees began their projects along traditional lines. Some of them, from the Times and from Reuters, won Pulitzer Prizes for images explicitly showing the dangers and humiliations people have endured in their search for a better life in Europe. As the crisis continued last year, the Belgian photographer Tomas van Houtryve embarked on a different kind of project. Supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, he followed the “digital breadcrumbs” left by refugees on social media as they passed through Turkey, Greece, and France. Van Houtryve, who has covered wars in Nepal and Afghanistan as a traditional photojournalist, became interested in the ways in which digital technology affects photography when, in 2013, he began working on a series of photographs of the United States taken from drones. For his current project, which he has called “Traces of Exile,” he shot video footage of sites along the migrant trail in Europe. Then, using an augmented-reality app called Layar, he overlaid his footage with screenshots of images posted by refugees on Instagram from those same sites.
▻http://www.newyorker.com/culture/portfolio/following-europes-migrant-trail-through-the-instagrams-of-refugees
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