Honorable Mention
Turkmen girl, Gaziantep
DESCRIPTION
Gaziantep, July 2015. A Turkmen baby girl, who had left Syria to seek shelter in neighbouring Turkey, cues to collect a bucket of bulgur and meatballs in tomato sauce prepared by the International Organisation for Migration. I stopped this little girl with her sister and asked her if I could take a picture of her. She immediately agreed. She then stopped to ask: "Do I need to smile?". I answered she did not 'need' to. Only 92Km separate Gaziantep from Aleppo. Turkey’s biggest city, Istanbul, with a population of 15 million, hosts 560,000 refugees in total. Gaziantep has just a 10th of the population, but took in 500,000 refugees. IOM implemented several relevant EU funded, crisis response project in Southern Turkey, all in support of the refugees and migrants.
AUTHOR
Andrea RICCI is Italian, but lives and works in Brussels. After graduating in Political Science, he spent the early 90's as a contributor to La Repubblica; then moved to Belgium to get an MA in Bruges (College of Europe), and to progressively integrate the international community of diplomats, crisis managers and risk analysts active in Brussels. He has a PhD in Communication and Information Sciences and has written and taught on early warning and crisis response. Expression of a family culture which revolved around Politics and Art, raised between Rome, Pisa and Florence, Andrea in 2002 decided to devote himself to study - with a camera - his working environment and the major international crises he could witness. A participant observer when working on photojournalism projects, Andrea has a keen interest in documentary photography, and his photographic practice develops in parallel to his research and art history studies.
