More than one hundred thousand men, women and children have fled civil war in Sudan's Blue Nile State. These are the shoes that made the journey.
Ongoing attacks by the Sudanese Armed Forces and supported militias have driven hundreds of thousands of refugees into South Sudan from their homes in the Sudanese border states of Blue Nile and South Kordofan, where conflict reignited in June 2011 between Khartoum and SPLA-North, the northern remnant of the southern liberation movement. What little media attention the war has garnered has largely been directed at the situation in South Kordofan, commonly known as the Nuba mountains, so in June 2012 I travelled to the Blue Nile refugee camps in northeast South Sudan hoping to document that which others had not. I came with little more than curiosity and the hope that I would find something compelling.
My arrival coincided with an influx of 30,000 new refugees, whom I photographed across the border in Blue Nile at the end of their journey and upon their reception in South Sudan. I listened to their stories: grandparents left behind and brothers who never returned from fetching food, days hiding from Antanovs’ aerial bombardments and nights walking in the woods, treasured possessions lost and herds of livestock stolen.
The traumatic upheaval in their lives was wholly new for these refugees but it was hardly a novel phenomenon in the region. How does one represent the story of these individuals in a way that doesn’t blend into the thousands of pictures previously taken in similar situations? How does one represent a nightmarish journey in a static image?
And then I noticed the shoes. The incredible array of worn-down, ill-fitting, and jerry-rigged shoes formed a silent testimony to the arduous nature of the journey, the persistence and ingenuity of their owners, and the diversity of these individuals thrown together by tragic circumstance.
I also photographed each pair’s owner, but omitted those portraits from the final work. The name, age and gender are cited in the caption but the viewer is asked to imagine who is the person whose feet were in these shoes. The viewer cannot dismiss the subject as the familiar, pitiable other so easily if they are not confronted with a face different from their own. In this way, in this situation, I think the omission creates a greater human connection between the viewer and the subject.