Cesar Dezfuli - 2020 Sony Professional Grant
On 1st August 2016, 118 people were rescued from a rubber boat drifting in the Mediterranean Sea. The boat had departed some hours prior from Libya. In an attempt to give a human face to the event, Cesar Dezfuli photographed the passengers minutes after their rescue. Their faces, their looks, the marks on their bodies, all reflected the mood and physical state they were in after a journey that had already marked their lives forever. For Cesar, it was the beginning of a project that has been evolving ever since.
It soon became clear to Cesar that the people he photographed on that August day were not themselves. Their identities had become diluted somewhere along the way - hidden as a result of fear, or stolen through past abuses and humiliations. Over the last three years the photographer has worked hard to locate the 118 passengers of the boat, now scattered across Europe, in a bid to understand and document their true identities. He wanted to show that each individual had a latent identity that just needed a peaceful context in order to flourish again.
The Sony Professional Grant will allow Cesar to bring this project to a whole new level, notably by deepening his research and meeting again with other individuals who were rescued four years ago on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
