Hi Greg, good morning, with the elevator to the fourth floor, is it open?
So nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
Yeah.
First time man.
Come in.
Thank you.
You want to put your coat off, you can put it over here.
You seem to be, what I think is kind of funny, you are seem to be very successful with your
photography.
I mean you get a lot of attention.
They ask you how did that come about?
When I first started this project in 2006, there was a small group of people that actually
were working on the issue and had been for many, many years and what's really exciting
is over the past five years there's been this real kind of movement I guess when it comes
to the issue.
Yeah.
There's been a lot of people who want to know more about it.
The policymakers are now recognizing how significant the issue is.
This is the second book in a series of books from this larger project, Nowhere People and
it focuses on the Rohingya community from Burma and it's a group that I've actually
spent the most time photographing over the course of these eight years.
When it comes at least to the issue of statelessness, it really is in my opinion like the extreme
example of what statelessness can do to a community and the denial of citizenship.
In 1982, Burma changed its citizenship laws to basically exclude this whole entire community
from Burma.
So many administrative kind of challenges have been put in place for them by the Burmese
government that it makes life kind of untenable for them.
So they have to move forward like the denial of the right to get married without permission.
The arbitrary land seizure, forced labor, they really have no access to rights.
They really, they are pretty much the most extreme case of statelessness that you'll
find in the world today.
The reason why I really love books and the reason why I really love exhibitions is because
it provides people the time to slow down and to isolate themselves into a space where they
can actually really digest the pictures and what the information and the pictures are
showing them and telling them and read captions and read, become more in text and have more
time to kind of just reflect on what the pictures are telling them.
How can you photograph a human right?
How can you, how can you, how can an image articulate what a human right is and in a
lot of ways it's really difficult to be able to translate that into a picture but what
you can do is you can show what life is like when you don't have human rights, you know,
and that's, you can show the repercussions, the byproducts of not having those rights
affect people in their day to day lives.
This particular community is fanned out all across the world.
They pay human smugglers to get them into Malaysia or elsewhere in Indonesia and you
even find them across Europe, I mean including here in Holland and that's one of the people
that I've spent time, you know, photographing and talking with.
The challenge for them being here in Holland is that they have to actually provide evidence
of that belonging from where they were from and most people can't and the Rohingya is
exactly that kind of situation and he's in that situation to where he has no, the paperwork
that he does have shows no formal connection to Burma because Burma denies him and that
whole entire community an existence.
I mean like he receives assistance from, you know, civil society groups here in Amsterdam
and Holland and that's basically how he makes it one day after the next.
But the fact is that most of these status people, including him, they don't want to
be living a life based on charity, you know, they want to be, you know, creating their
own futures and really, you know, they want to be realizing their own dreams that they
have and not having that being controlled by others.
But how long is he in this situation now?
I think a couple years now and two years I believe and I think that in a lot of ways,
you know, his, he feels paralyzed like a lot of other stateless people here in Holland,
whether they be from Iraq or whether they be from Syria or whether they be from a lot
of the other countries where stateless people have originated from that find themselves
in Holland is that they find themselves in a lot of ways completely paralyzed by not being
able to have any control over the course of their futures.
But how can a person live like that year in, year out or day in, day out with almost no
hope on the horizon?
It seems to.
I think that's one of the questions that I always ask myself, you know, but I think
that that's also a quality that I found in stateless people all over the world is that,
you know, the persistence they have, the persistence and the determination, the tenacity and the
adaptability and the resourcefulness that they have to be able to make hope and in a
lot of ways they're, you know, a lot of them have lost hope, but a lot of them, you know,
but equal number of them still have hope that there's going to have a future and particularly
younger people, you know, how do the people react to you in Holland?
If you want to talk to them, they want to talk, but do they want to have the picture
taken or being on a video?
You know, I mean, in a lot of ways, the situation for stateless people here in Holland is that
they really are incredibly fearful of what will happen to them if they are stopped by
the police or they don't have the right papers to be able to provide somebody, you know, and
that leads to detention, that leads to, you know, living a life every single day wondering
if tomorrow somebody is going to ask you for something that you can't provide and a lot
of ways they can't provide that information.
I just think that inherently stateless people, you know, they, in many ways, they feel like
they've been failed by everyone, you know, they've been failed by the country that they
believe is their home because a lot of them are rejected by that country, by that state,
that country, and wherever they have fled to for asylum to try to find and normalize
their status and try to belong, they've been a lot of times failed by those systems too,
and I think that that's what you see here in Holland, is that, you know, the procedures
aren't set up here illegally within the country to be able to identify who they are and also
try to find solutions that can make them feel safe and secure as they're in the process
of trying to normalize and regularize their status.
This is an inherited characteristic, something that can, that is passed down from one generation
to the next.
So they have to be written in some way.
But the child might be registered here, might be registered and might have a birth certificate,
but that doesn't mean that it has a nationality.
Oh, is it?
Yeah.
And, you know, in United States, any child that's born on American soil, automatically
is extended to U.S. citizenship, and that's not the case here in Holland.
So in a lot of ways, what happens is stateless people flee their home countries, are seeking
asylum in Holland, they have a child here in Holland, and because the parent is stateless,
the child then ends up inheriting that statelessness as well.
And so what's really interesting for me is that, you know, in a lot of ways, you know,
the situation because of the laws, the way that they are in Holland is actually perpetuating
statelessness in the country and for youngsters and people who are being born here.
They go to schools.
They go to different levels.
You know, they go to school.
Sure.
But that's where the difference comes into having a residence permit and actually having
nationality, where, you know, residence permit can only take you so far in life.
Having nationality gives you a belonging.
The third book will be all of the work and it will show these very unique kind of stories
that each group and each kind of category or each place encompasses yet at the same
time, I really hope that it creates one kind of single narrative about what it's like
to be a stateless person anywhere in the world.
