Viva Lewes Issue #124 January 2017

ON THIS MONTH: PHOTOGRAPHY
Jenny Matthews
Documentary photographer
Why did you
decide to photograph
the refugees
in Calais?
A lot of my work
has featured the
plight of refugees,
particularly in
Africa, and when
I heard about
Calais, it seemed
a logical thing to
make a piece about
it. There had been
refugees in Calais before, but the so-called ‘Jungle’
started developing – on a land-fill site – in spring
2015 and I first went there in August of that year.
The picture above shows that life goes on…
You really notice the spirit of resilience shown by
the refugees. It was impressive how much they
made do with the little they had, and also how they
did what they could to keep themselves clean and
tidy. For women, it was important to put make-up
on and do their nails, for men it was important to
have a haircut. This helped them maintain a sense
of dignity.
Whose tent was it? It was in the Sudanese section
of the camp. Different nationalities tended to live
together, so there were different areas for Sudanese,
Ethiopians, Eritreans, Afghans, Pakistanis,
Iraqi Kurds and, increasingly as time went on, for
Syrians. There were Sudanese refugees escaping
from two different wars in their country.
How did you make yourself ‘invisible’ in order
to take the pictures? You can’t, and I didn’t.
You have to talk to people: some, understandably,
didn’t want their picture taken, and others were
very welcoming.
I’ve heard it suggested - rather illiberally, I
must add - that the refugees in Calais must be
rich to have
travelled so
far, so they’re
not ‘proper’
refugees. Often
they’ve sold up
everything they
have to get going.
Sometimes
they started
their journeys
with money collected
by family
and neighbours
so they could go out and earn money in Europe to
send back home. I befriended a young Sudanese
man called Anwar who had taken five years working
his way through Africa and Europe, stopping
and working in bakeries in Libya and Egypt to
earn enough for the next stage of his journey. But
by the time they reached Calais they often have no
money at all. They couldn’t buy food, they had to
wait for people to give it to them.
Your photographs are being exhibited to mark
Holocaust Memorial Day. How come? One
of the people I photographed for the project was
Baron Dubs, who was a refugee from Czechoslovakia
on the Kindertransport, and recently
campaigned to give refugee children safe passage
to the UK. It’s important to remember the Holocaust,
but it’s also important to realise that wars
didn’t stop in 1945, and we have to be aware that
terrible outrages have happened since and are still
happening now.
Interview by Alex Leith
Jenny’s photographs will be displayed in a trail of
over 50 shop windows from 27th Jan (Holocaust
Memorial Day) to 19th February. For details of
other events taking place to mark Holocaust Memorial
Day, see Diary Dates on pg 47.
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