One Year Photographing the Lives of Migrants

In early 2015, after hundreds of migrants died when their boats capsized off the coast of Libya, the photographer Daniel Castro Garcia and the designer Tom Saxby decided to travel from their homes in London to Lampedusa, the island at the southernmost point of Italy that acts as an entry point for migrants arriving from Africa. Their trip was a reaction against the types of coverage of the crisis they were seeing in the news at the time: “We read articles in major national newspapers that used words like ‘cockroaches’ and ‘swarms’ to describe those that attempt this journey from North Africa to Europe,” Garcia, who collaborates with Saxby under the name John Radcliffe Studio, told me. They were concerned, too, with “the image-making that was released around this subject”—photos of overcrowded boats and camps, and clashes with the police, that emphasized the masses of fleeing people instead of the individual lives that were being upended.