2019 Winner
No Place on Earth
Patrick Brown- Winner of the 2019 FotoEvidence Book Award with WPP
Book Award Years
Finalists
Since 2017, photographer Patrick Brown has documented the world's fastest growing refugee crisis and one of the most rapid human outflows in recent history. Risking death at sea or on foot, more than 700,000 Rohingya fled the destruction of their homes and persecution in the northern Rakhine State of Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh. Arriving at the makeshift camps, most refugees reported harrowingly consistent stories of murder and rape, all of which testify to a deliberate campaign of eradication. “No Place On Earth” provides an intimate portrait of the survivors of the recent persecution and their bleak conditions in overcrowded refugee camps. The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim minority group in Rakhine State, western Myanmar. They number around one million people, laws passed in the 1980s effectively deprived them of Myanmar citizenship. Violence erupted in Myanmar on 25 August after a faction of Rohingya militants attacked police posts, killing 12 members of the Myanmar security forces. Myanmar authorities, in places supported by groups of Buddhists, launched a crackdown, attacking Rohingya villages and burning houses. In late August 2017, I starting hearing reports from friends and colleagues in Bangladesh that Rohingya Muslims were flooding across the border with horrific stories perpetrated by the Myanmar military and vigilantes. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called the crackdown in Rakhine State, Burma, “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. There is nothing clean about Ethnic cleansing – up close and on the ground, it’s murder, it’s rape, it’s people being slaughtered in the most systematic and barbaric way. It’s people. While euphemisms and diplomatic language can obscure the true horror inflicted by oppressive regimes, photography cuts through all the cold clinical terminology. Through photographs we’re forced to confront the cruel reality of what ethnic cleansing really looks like.