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In this image released by World Press Photo titled "Reporting Europe's Refugee Crisis" by photographer Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times which won the first prize in the General News Stories category shows refugees arriving by boat near the village of Skala on Lesbos, Greece, 16 November 2015.

Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times, World Press Photo via AP

'Reporting Europe's refugee crisis' by photographer Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times won the World Press photo first prize in the General News Stories category and the Pulitzer Prize. Click to enlarge the image

Sergey Ponomarev took his now famous picture of a boat of Syrian refugees mooring to a Greek island shore on Nov. 16, 2015. Many boats were landing there at the time - on some days, up to 50 would arrive from Turkey. The majority were inflatable rubber dinghies, but some of the boats were wooden, and you could always tell that the refugees preferred to have a wooden boat.

Ponomarev was there to photograph the landings for The New York Times.

"Every day, long before sunrise, we would go to the beach. There was a hill there; I climbed it with my binoculars and watched the horizon, waiting for the first boats to arrive," Ponomarev recalls. "We would often spend the whole day on the beach, going from boat to boat. The boat from the picture was one of them."

From the beaches in Greece, Ponomarev followed the refugees to Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia, all the way to European countries where they would seek asylum. Off and on, he would spend five months working on this project.

Exactly five months after Ponomarev took his iconic picture, he won the most coveted journalistic award in the world - the Pulitzer Prize. "It's really something. I suppose it means that this last year I did good," he told The Moscow Times.

Ponomarev says he is motivated above all by a desire to bridge the gap that people introduce between themselves and human tragedies elsewhere in the world.

"I want to show that the world is much bigger than an apartment or an office," he says, "and that at any given minute there are people living lives far worse than our own."

The road to Pulitzer

Sergey Ponomarev. Source: Press photo

Ponomarev, 35, is the third Russian photographer to have won the Pulitzer Prize. The significance of the award is not, apparently, lost on him. Throughoutour interview, the photographer is interrupted by dozens of messages and emails congratulating him on the victory. "Wow," he says at one point, "I just received a message from James Nachtwey. The great James Nachtwey!"

Nachtwey, the world famous war photographer, had in fact praised Ponomarev's skills to The Moscow Times before the interview. "Sergey's visual perception operates at a very high level. He has the ability to organize what he perceives in a compelling, complex manner using the full range of photographic vocabulary with great mastery," Nachtwey said.

Ponomarev's path to Pulitzer took him through wars, conflict zones and tragedies.

He worked in the Russian town of Beslan in 2004, where terrorists attacked a school and held dozens of children hostage. He covered "Nord-Ost," another Russian hostage crisis in 2002, when terrorists attacked theater-goers in Moscow. He documented atrocities in the war-torn Gaza strip in Palestine, revolution in Libya, the Maidan protests in Ukraine, and military clashes in eastern Ukraine and Syria.

However, Ponomarev refuses to define himself as just a war photographer. "You may think of me as such because there's a picture of me wearing a bulletproof vest on my website," he says with a laugh.

"But I see my role as simply developing stories that are meant to disturb the world."

He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, which he says is currently his "most active" working partnership. Previously he worked for nine years as a staff photographer at the Associated Press news agency and contributed to Russian outlets including the Kommersant newspaper and Gazeta.ru.

"The media in Russia has changed a lot since then," he says. "The vast majority have lost their independence and are now on one or the other side of the fence. I prefer to work for outlets that are more independent."

Russian riot police disperse opposition protesters in Moscow. May 2012. Source: Sergey Ponomarev / AP

Ponomarev is lucky to partner with a newspaper like The New York Times, says another illustrious Russian war photographer, the multi-award-winning Yury Kozyrev. "It is great that they give photographers time and resources to pursue important stories, like the refugee story," he told The Moscow Times. "Its rare these days, and not only in Russia, but the whole world."

Competing with kittens

"People see the world through our eyes," says Ponomarev. "I attended a conference on refugees once. The speakers were all about numbers and statistics, and I could tell no one there had ever seen these refugees. My speech was the last one that day - and the photographs I showed simply bowled the audience over." Photography is a universal storytelling language, he says. "People don't need to know a foreign language to understand photographs."

Arguably, photography is losing its power to change the course of events. No longer can it stop a war like it could in the 1960s and 1970s, says Ponomarev.

Then, the whole world was shaken by Nick Ut's image of a naked girl running from a napalm attack in Vietnam, and by Eddie Adams' picture of a police chief executing a young man in the street in war-torn Saigon.

"Those explosive images made society demand an end to the war," he says. "Now serious photographs with bloody or violent scenes are hidden behind age restrictions and notes that sensitive people shouldn't look at them. They don't shock people as much."

Occasionally, society is moved to act. Images of a drowned three-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach caused public outcry across the world.

Members of the Russian radical feminist group Pussy Riot try to perform at the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow in February 2012. Two members of Pussy Riot were jailed. Source: Sergey Ponomarev / AP

It prompted heated discussion and divisions inside the professional community as to whether such disturbing images should be published. "Personally I'm against all these restrictions," Ponomarev says.

"The more people see injustice, the more they are willing to change it," he adds.

The other major threat for serious photographers is the increasing battle for visual attention with light entertainment.

"We are losing the battle with kittens and boobs," the photographer concedes. "But I'm certain we won't lose in the end - kittens and easy visual pleasures might be constants, but we are always coming up with something new."
First published by The Moscow Times.
All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Pulitzer Prize winner Ponomarev looks for stories to 'disturb the world'

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In this image released by World Press Photo titled "Reporting Europe's Refugee Crisis" by photographer Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times which won the first prize in the General News Stories category shows refugees arriving by boat near the village of Skala on Lesbos, Greece, 16 November 2015.

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He was born in Moscow ,Russia on December 11, 1980

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Pulitzer Prize
World Press Photo Award
Getty Images Grant

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This important and compelling documentary series was selected as a finalist in the Photojournalism category of the Magnum Photography Awards 2016. Discover more inspiring work from all 44 of the winners, finalists, jurors' picks and student spotlight award winners.

Europe is experiencing one of the most significant influxes of migrants and refugees in its recent history. Pushed by civil war and terror and pulled by the promise of a better life, hundreds of thousands of people have fled the Middle East and Africa, risking their lives along the way.

The scale of the crisis has put huge pressures on some destination countries, particularly Germany, Greece, Austria, and Hungary. The 28 member states of the European Union registered around 627,000 asylum claims in 2014; in 2015, that number increased dramatically to 1.3 million.

People undertake such a dangerous journey for varying reasons, including the conflicts raging in Syria and Afghanistan and the human rights abuses in Eritrea. 54% of the refugees in 2015 came from three countries: Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. There are also people setting out from Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kosovo, Iraq, Iran, Darfur, Eritrea and beyond hoping to find a new lives somewhere in Germany, France or the UK.

The most direct routes are fraught with danger. Most of those heading for Greece take the relatively short voyage from Turkey to the islands of Kos, Chios, Lesbos and Samos-often in flimsy rubber dinghies or small wooden boats.

There is virtually no infrastructure on these small Greek islands to cope with the thousands of people arriving; this means that local volunteers provide vital assistance.

Many refugees attempting to reach Germany and other northern EU countries travel via the perilous Western Balkans route, where they run the risk of encountering brutal human traffickers and robbers. Faced with a huge influx of people, Hungary has built a controversial 175km (110-mile) razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia. It has also urged EU partners not to send back migrants who have travelled through Hungary.

Under an EU rule known as the "Dublin Regulation," refugees are required to claim asylum in the member state in which they first arrive. But some EU countries-such as Greece, Italy and Croatia-have been allowing migrants to pass through without registering.

-Sergey Ponomarev

Interview

Sergey Ponomarev has had a very productive stretch recently: thanks to his work on "The Exodus" (shot in large part for The New York Times), Ponomarev received prizes ranging from the Magnum Photography Awards to the Pulitzer Prize as well as a First Prize from World Press Photo.

The photographer's strongest image in the series has been compared to the celebrated 19th century painting "The Raft of the Medusa" by the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault-high praise, and well deserved.

Ponomarev is no romantic. He is a working conflict photographer, and as such he travels to areas that are experiencing significant upheaval and unrest. LensCulture contributor Anna Akage spoke with him at length. Below, Akage and Ponomarev speak about topics ranging from the ambiguities of modern-day warfare to the new censorship that photography faces in our changing media environment.

LC: Can you tell us about what it was like to be on the ground with the refugees? How close did you get to the conflict?

SP: I started shooting on the island of Lesbos at the beginning of August 2015. We spent our first three days waiting to see just one boat. But by October, the trickle turned into a stream of fifty boats a day. We watched the sea from the hills, and we moved quickly from one beach to another to photograph. After that, I went with the refugees to continental Greece, and from there we took the so-called "Balkan Pass": Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and then into the rest of Western Europe.

Most of the time, I traveled with them-I took the same roads and used the same methods of transportation. I even shared water and food with the refugees.

But there were always enough volunteers there as well, so I can't say I helped them much with the basics. More often it was about communication-I could tell them what lay ahead, what kind of camps to expect, what kind of transport would work best. So I was with them and not with them at the same time. After all, there was one key difference between us-I was able to cross the borders officially...

LC: How were you welcomed by your subjects?

SP: At first, the refugees didn't trust us photographers: they covered their faces and told us that they didn't want to be photographed. Even so, many of them did understand that they are a part of a key historical event, and that we were only trying to publicize their story-maybe even generate some help. So, over time, the refugees became used to our presence and started to act more friendly (except in those moments when they were simply too tired to be photographed).

But even with our good intentions, there were many hard moments: children crying, wanting to eat or sleep or go to the toilet. Women carrying heavy things and understanding nothing; men exhausted because of the travel and pressure and uncertainty. And through it all, nobody really knows what they're doing or where they're going. All of these circumstances had to be taken into consideration as we-the photographers-tried to keep our relationship with them friendly and open.

LC: What was your attitude on the subject? Did it change over time?

SP: I pitied them. I also understand that the European Union has to shoulder a lot of responsibility as a result of the turmoil in the Middle East. Though it's impossible to generalize completely-we met so many refugees-almost all of my interactions were with very civilized and educated people.

But there's another side to the story: social media. I learned that for some refugees, the process of seeking a better life turned into an internet phenomenon in their homeland. Thanks to the ubiquitousness of cell phones, the refugees were constantly sharing their daily travel experiences on social networks. This likely encouraged others to follow in their footsteps.

Remember, Facebook is very different in Russia, England, America, or any Arab-speaking country. When I saw my Arab colleague's Facebook timeline, it was packed with stories from refugees. There were even advertisements published by smugglers.

All of that is to say that in order to do my job effectively and remain objective, I had to keep both sides in mind.

LC: What makes it difficult to communicate with people who are in conflict situations?

SP: Propaganda. The longer the conflict exists, the harder it is to find people thinking critically and clearly. In the early stages of any conflict, the media environment is more diversified, and communication is much easier. People are less aggressive towards the ideas that break official lines and thus are able to empathize with the other side. Later, the positions harden beyond all hope. This happens even with independent photojournalists who have spent too much time in a specific conflict zone; I've met professionals in Ukraine, Israel and Syria who became too attached to one of the sides and lost their professional objectivity.

LC: What did you find most challenging about this project?

SP: Technically there were no problems at all. As I am a minimalist in my working methods-I never carry a battery of lenses, I work with natural light, etc.-I had few problems. Still, it was physically difficult to walk that much and emotionally draining to see so many people venturing out into the darkness.

More than that, I carried with me the knowledge of what lay ahead-the resentment of locals when refugees entered their towns, or countries in the EU maintaining that they couldn't accept more people.

There were moments while I was following the stream of humanity when I felt, truly, that these people weren't moving towards a better life.

Things seemed especially grim when officials started to close the borders and the first camps appeared. By that point, it was the middle of the winter, and there were people trying to survive in the cold mud and driving rain. To watch all of that was very challenging.

LC: You worked in the Gaza Strip before this and took no particular interest in Palestinian refugees; later, you became interested in the European refugee crisis. Why?

SP: What happened to the Palestinians began long, long before I arrived. Meanwhile, in Europe, I was witnessing the most active phase of the crisis. While it had been clear for some time that Europe was going to face some pressure from migrants-there were already paths from Morocco and Libya-when the new path opened through Greece, it reached a tipping point. That's what I wanted to capture.

Now that I've become so involved with the story I want to follow it further. I recently received a grant from Getty, and I plan to cover the second stage of the refugee story, namely the temporary settlements in the EU.

LC: But it's worth noting that Europe, compared to Africa and the Middle East, is facing a much smaller stream of refugees-just about 7% according to the UNHCR. Yet it's claiming all of the media attention...

SP: Absolutely. Lebanon is making hardly any noise about hosting well over one million refugees, and their total population is only around four million. In my opinion, this goes back to the immense cultural differences between the Middle East and Europe; the differences in lifestyles, laws, family structures and traditions are vast. This distinction is visible in everything from the fashion, to the court system, to the way the refugees are being welcomed or turned away.

LC: This refugee series has received numerous awards. Despite your career in the field, however, you often discuss war with a certain disdain-why?

SP: For me, war is something grand like "The Great Patriotic War" [Editors' note: this is the Russian term for World War II] or even the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (at the beginning, anyways). There, you have two sides openly and officially in a state of war with one another: each side takes responsibility for its actions. But what is happening nowadays, just about everywhere in the world, is more "conflict" than war.

For example, in many conflict zones, you can't sit on the front line waiting for news because the front line is 60 kilometers [around 37 miles] wide. Furthermore, there won't be any actual contact-just artillery firing indiscriminately. In some places, there is no defined front line or organized opposition. You can see this in Gaza. On the Strip, you're standing next to soldiers and civilians, but you can't tell the difference between the two.

In short: there is no singular combat-there is only omnipresent conflict. To shoot this new reality, we have to work differently: we run alongside the rebels, mingle with the targeted crowd, and go where things are hot and chaotic. Being a conflict photographer now is more dangerous than ever before.

LC: So the production has become more dangerous, and meanwhile the distribution is under cataclysmic shifts. What is your view on the modern media landscape vis-a-vis conflict photography?

SP: Photography used to have an effect and a serious impact on public opinion. Photographs used to help stop wars-just think of what happened with Vietnam. Images of Africans starving in the 80s had a similar effect. But now we have internet users who randomly scroll across endless pages and occasionally come across a photo from a war that shows dead bodies or drowned children or bombed houses. Instead of being distressed and enraged by the imagery, these users are more likely to get worked up because the scenes are ruining their morning coffee.

In terms of distribution, so many media outlets have started warning viewers of *graphic content*. This stops many people from ever seeing the images. For those who do click, it usually goes something like this: they click, exhale, press "watch," and scan the screen as quickly as possible before jumping to another page and another distraction. All of this pushes people into their isolated bubbles. Suffering and injustices from around the world simply disappear. We war and conflict photographers are still producing work, but we're creating images that most people block out of their lives.

Perhaps crueler images would have a greater chance of making an impact. Maybe they could halt the conflicts or cause combatants to act with more humanity. Instead it is likely that these harder pictures just won't show up on anyone's newsfeed-they won't generate enough likes in the algorithm to make it to the surface. Recently, Facebook tried to censor the image of the Vietnamese girl made by Nick Ut before relenting. This is a disturbing sign of things to come.

-Sergey Ponomarev, interviewed by Anna Akage

Anna Akage is freelance writer from Kiev, Ukraine. More of her work can be found on her writing portfolio website.

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The Refugee Crisis in Europe - Interview with Sergey Ponomarev | LensCulture

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This important and compelling documentary series was selected as a finalist in the Photojournalism category of the Magnum Photography Awards 2016. Discover more inspiring work from all 44 of the winners, finalists, jurors' picks and student spotlight award winners. Europe is experiencing one of the most significant influxes of migrants and refugees in its recent history.

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There's been a civil war in Syria for the last eight years, with different groups trying to seize control of the country.

The fighting has been between:

Soldiers who support the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad

Fighters known as , who don't want Assad to be in power anymore

The group that calls itself Islamic State (IS)

In the chaos of fighting between the government and anti-government fighters, IS took over large parts of Iraq and then moved into eastern Syria, where they were able to gain land and power.

By March 2019, IS had lost control of all the land they once occupied. More than 12,000 suspected IS members are now being held by Kurdish forces.

The situation is very complicated because other countries have got involved in the conflict.

The Syrian government's key supporters are Russia and Iran, while the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia backed the rebels. The UK, France and other western countries have also provided varying levels of support to what they consider to be "moderate" rebels.

Fighting continues. Recently, the US removed troops from north-east of the country, which gave way for Turkey to launch a military attack against Kurdish-forces in northern Syria.

According to the United Nations (UN) - a group of countries working together to try to bring peace - at least 6.2 million ordinary people have had to leave their homes inside Syria, while another 5.6 million have left to go abroad.

Why did the fighting in Syria first begin?

Even before the conflict began in Syria, many Syrians were complaining about high unemployment, officials not behaving as they should do, and a lack of political freedom under their President Bashar al-Assad.

However, the event which caused the situation to develop into a full-blown civil war dates back to 2011, to the Syrian city of Deraa.

Local people decided to protest after 15 school children were arrested - and reportedly tortured - for writing anti-government graffiti on a wall.

The protests were peaceful to begin with, calling for the release of the children, democracy and greater freedom for people in the country.

The government responded angrily and, on 18 March 2011, the army opened fire on protesters, killing four people. The following day, they shot at mourners at the victims' funerals, killing another person.

People were shocked and angry at what had happened and soon the unrest spread to other parts of the country.

At first, the protesters just wanted democracy and greater freedom.

But after government forces opened fire on peaceful demonstrations, people demanded that President Bashar al-Assad resign. However, he refused to do this which made the protesters extremely angry.

President Assad still had a lot of people in Syria that supported him and his government, so they began to fight against people who were against the government.

In July 2012, the International Red Cross said the violence in Syria had become so widespread that it was in a state of civil war.

Who are the rebel fighters?

There isn't one single group of people fighting against President Assad and the government's army.

The group who want the president to step down - called the opposition - is made up of several kinds of people. These include groups of rebel fighters, political parties who disagree with Assad, and those living in exile who cannot return to the country.

When the conflict began, it was thought that there could have been as many as 1,000 different groups opposing the government since the conflict began, with an estimated 100,000 fighters.

Right now there are a handful of groups remaining and the number of fighters has reduced as well.

How did Islamic State become involved?

It wasn't long before the crisis in Syria became more than just a war between people who are for or against President Assad.

In 2011, the group calling Islamic State (IS) joined the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, where it found a safe haven and easy access to weapons.

IS is a militant group with extreme, violent views, which has used this violence against anyone who doesn't agree with what they think. They have also persecuted other groups, including Christians and Yazidis.

In 2014, the group began to take over large areas of a country called Iraq, next door to Syria. Then, they moved into eastern Syria and - in the chaos of the war - they were able to gain land and power there too.

Raqqa was the first big city captured by IS in Syria in early 2014. The group went on take over large parts of the country towards Aleppo in the north, and along the Turkish border.

Both Assad's forces and the rebels were fighting a separate battle against IS at the same time as fighting each other.

To try to stop IS, in September 2014 the US used planes to attack IS fighters in Iraq. These attacks are known as airstrikes.

Just over a year later, UK MPs voted in favour of military action against IS in Syria too. The first airstrikes were carried out by RAF Tornado jets within hours of the vote in the House of Commons.

Towards the end of 2017, Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters joined together - backed by America - to take back the city of Raqqa in the north-west. This ended three years of rule by IS which had made Raqqa its headquarters.

Following this, Syrian state TV - controlled by President Assad's government - said the Syrian army had retaken the city of Deir al-Zour, the largest city in eastern Syria. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based activist group, said government forces had taken control of the city after weeks of fighting.

This was a big stronghold of IS in Syria, which showed how much IS had lost the control it once had. The city had been very important to IS because it is close to the border with Iraq.

But there was still some disagreement over whether IS had been cleared from the area completely. Syrian state TV reported that the city was completely free from terrorism, while other reports said the Syrian army and its allies were still clearing IS fighters from the area.

In March 2019, the US-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria declared military victory over IS. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) (a group largely made up of Kurdish fighters) gained control of the town Baghuz, which was the final stronghold of IS.

This was a major moment in the fight against IS. At the group's most powerful, they controlled 34,000 square miles of land - approximately the size of the UK - stretching across Syria and Iraq.

Now, IS occupy a few hundred square metres near Syria's border with Iraq.

There are still concerns about IS though, as it is thought that some of its fighters are still operating in hiding.

Also, some believe that Turkey's recent invasion of north-east Syria risks the revival of the Islamic State group.

What has been the impact of the war on people living in Syria?

Millions of ordinary people living in Syria have had to escape from their homes to find somewhere safer to live.

According to the United Nations (UN), a group that works to try to solve some of the world's problems, more than five million Syrians have had to leave the country. Many have gone to neighbouring countries, like Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey or Iraq.

More than six million more people have tried to find safety elsewhere in Syria.

Turkey is the largest host country of registered refugees with over 3.6 million Syrian refugees living in the country.

By December 2018 the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights recorded that 367,965 people had lost their lives, including more than 120,000 ordinary people who aren't even soldiers or meant to be involved in the fighting. This figure doesn't include people who are missing or who aren't recorded though, so the actual number is thought to be much higher.

By February 2019, some 13 million people were estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance, including 5.2 million in desperate need.

Lots of children can no longer go to school because their schools have been destroyed or there are no teachers where they have moved to.

When people are forced to leave the country where they live like this, they become known as refugees. The conflict in Syria has caused one of the largest refugee movements in recent history.

Many refugees made the decision to try to reach Europe. This is because some countries in Europe said they would accept refugees who wanted to start a new life here.

Millions of people both inside and outside Syria are in desperate need of help, but aid agencies say that getting help to people inside the country is very difficult and dangerous.

What else do we need to know about this war?

One other topic that has been talked about a lot is the use of chemical weapons.

There is an international law which bans countries from using chemical weapons in wars, as they are deemed too cruel to use on other people.

However, in August 2013, it was reported that they were used in the war in Syria, which caused anger around the world. Both the rebels and the Syrian government denied that they were responsible.

MPs in Westminster voted against responding to this with military action in Syria. But the US and French governments discussed limited missile strikes against military targets.

In September 2013, Russia and the US reached an agreement which said the Syrian government should give up its chemical weapons and destroy them so they can never again be used. This was important as Russia and the US support different sides in the Syrian war.

The process of destroying the weapons began in October 2013 and the people working on this project were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later that month.

In April 2017, there was reportedly another chemical weapons attack on a town in north-west Syria, which killed and injured many people.

At the time, many weapons experts, the UK and other countries, and US President Donald Trump said President Assad's government was to blame for the attack.

But the Syrian President said he didn't do it and Russia, which supports him, said it was the result of aircraft hitting chemical weapons on the ground, which belonged to the rebels.

The US responded with military action by carrying out missile attacks on Syria, which the UK said it supported.

Another suspected chemical weapons attack took place in Douma in April 2018. Again experts blamed the Syrian government for what happened but both they and Russia said they didn't do it.

That led to most recent air strikes by the UK, the USA and France against what they said are Syrian government chemical weapons factories.

So what next for Syria?

It doesn't look like the fighting is likely to end any time soon, as there is still a big power struggle going on in the region.

There is a stalemate between the two sides. This means that the government forces and the rebel groups are unable to defeat each other or agree on the future.

And now Turkey has begun military action in the north of the country, causing more people to flee their homes.

Turkey's president Tayyip Erdogan has said he will "never declare a ceasefire" which would end the military action against Kurdish forces in northern Syria.

Turkey wants to push these forces away from Syria's border area.

The country is being destroyed by the conflict, including a lot of its rich cultural heritage. All six of the country's six Unesco World Heritage sites have been significantly damaged.

Lots of countries are trying to continue to supply aid, such as food and emergency supplies. But it is difficult when almost 3 million Syrians live in areas which are very difficult for aid workers to get to.

The rest of the world will continue to try to work out if there is a way to help Syria achieve peace. But for the time being, the conflict continues.
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What's happening in Syria? - CBBC Newsround

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There's been a civil war in Syria for the last eight years, with different groups trying to seize control of the country.

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The facts: What you need to know about the Syria crisis

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More than nine years in, Syria’s civil war has fueled a massive exodus. See the staggering statistics and learn the facts behind the figures.

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A Lens on Syria

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For people to realize there difference between themselves and human tragedies elsewhere in the world.

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"I want to show that the world is much bigger than an apartment or an office," he says, "and that at any given minute there are people living lives far worse than our own." (Sergey Ponomarv)

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"We don't need words anymore (to tell stories) -- images are an international language of storytelling." (Sergey Ponomarv)

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Written by By Judith Vonberg, CNN London

Afghanistan, Tripoli, Gaza, Chernobyl, Lebanon: a litany of horror. Armed with his camera, photojournalist Sergey Ponomarev has documented some of the most devastating stories of conflict and human suffering of the last decades.

His latest exhibition, "A Lens on Syria," is now showing at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London, a visual testimony to a war that -- at the last count a year ago -- has killed 400,000 civilians and created 4.9 million refugees.

"I was there before the war," Ponomarev explains. "I was fascinated by the culture and roots of this nation... It's a beautiful land.

"I'm just really sorry that they're destroying that with their fighting."

Taken in 2013 and 2014, the images in the first part of the exhibition -- "Assad's Syria" -- are works of art as well as documents of that destruction.

Despite their often ugly content, the aesthetic quality of the photographs -- the use of color, the play of light and shade, the flawless framing -- is hard to ignore.

"I'm always using light, using color, using metaphors, but I never try to interfere in the reality unfolding," says Ponomarev. "I never stage images."

"Reality will give you more surprises... you will see striking or beautiful events happen in front of you."

He takes very few images, spending much of his time waiting rather than clicking. Most photographers shoot everything they see, a fixer once told him, "You're unusual."

"But I know what kind of frame I want and I wait until I see it," he says. "And I try to be as invisible as I can."

Inside Assad's Syria

While many Western journalists have gained access to the country with rebel groups, Ponomarev, a Russian national, was only able to enter with a visa from the Syrian government.

For him, it was "an opportunity to... get something unique from inside the government zones."

One of the most striking images in the exhibition shows an election portrait of President Bashar al-Assad hung on a destroyed shopping mall in the Khalidiya district of Homs soon after it was retaken by government forces in 2014.

"If there is a portrait of Assad, it means this zone is controlled by (him)," Ponomarev explains. "They hang that as a sign of victory."

For most Westerners, however, "this picture tells a death toll."

Another image on display was taken in Palmyra in 2014. It shows the ancient Arch of Triumph, destroyed by ISIS the following year.

Ponomarev says he was one of the last Western journalists in Palmyra before it was taken by ISIS. "I keep this photo in my flat, the only photograph (of mine) that I keep there, because that's a heritage that's now destroyed."

From conflict to exodus

Ponomarev became a freelance photojournalist in 2012 after working for Associated Press in Russia.

Since then, he has been awarded some of the biggest prizes in international photography, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his work with colleagues at The New York Times documenting the lives of refugees arriving in Europe.

Forty-six of the photos he took on that trip are on display in the second part of this exhibition in an installation titled "The Exodus." Many of them have never been shown in public before.

In a darkened room, a compelling, sometimes distressing, story of flight is played out on a large screen, each image appearing for a few seconds before giving way to the next -- a never-ending narrative of the human search for refuge.

Ponomarev sees this narrative as the direct consequence of wars such as the Syrian conflict, and the layout of this two-part exhibition invites the visitor to draw the same conclusion.

Back in the first room we see Syrians apparently going about their normal lives -- shopping, baking bread, relaxing at a café, praying.

The war was there, but people continued with their lives, recalls Ponomarev. "There might be an explosion just in the next block, and on the other side of the street... there's a normal busy street buzz and a traffic jam and people will live normally."

In the next room, the visual signifiers of conflict become harder to miss: explosions, soldiers, rubble and the look of fear in the eyes of civilians.

Any semblance of normality has gone. Who would not flee from this tide of destruction, the exhibition seems to ask, before presenting us with the desperate stories of those who did just that -- but were met with violence and fenced-up borders after reaching Europe's shores.

The power of visual storytelling

Ponomarev is inspired by the work of photojournalists such as James Nachtwey and Sebastiao Salgado, who "went as deep as they could and tried to reveal the hardships of mankind."

Yet he's also aware that the power of photography has been depleted by the constant stream of images that we are fed in what he calls a "digital millennium."

"We are overwhelmed by imagery and images don't have the same effect as before," he says. "Photographers now will never stop wars."

But Ponomarev believes there are positives too. "We don't need words anymore (to tell stories) -- images are an international language of storytelling."

The story told in this exhibition is of a conflict that is both continuing and beginning to pass into history. The images on display are "historical documents," Ponomarev says, as well as reminders of a current, and very pressing, crisis.

This juxtaposition of the contemporary and the historical is welcomed by the museum, which opened in 1917 in the midst of the First World War. By engaging with contemporary conflict, "we're continuing what we started to do 100 years ago," says Hilary Roberts, curator of the exhibition.

And war will always be a compelling subject. "War is such an extreme human experience," says Roberts. "People have the urge to either bear witness -- and the camera is a very good way of doing that -- or they seek insight and understanding."

And Ponomarev's images offer just that.

Reflecting on the experience of reporting from war zones, he unsurprisingly selects a visual metaphor.

"There's only black and white in conflict zones," he says, "only life and death, enemy and friend."

Perhaps that was his experience, but the images he has created are rich with nuance and bear witness to a complex reality that is filled with shades of gray.
"Sergey Ponomarev: A Lens on Syria" runs until September 3 at the Imperial War Museum in London. It is part of the museum's broader season, "Syria: A Conflict Explored."

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'sergey ponomarev: a lens on syria'  - cnn

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Written by By Judith Vonberg, CNN London Afghanistan, Tripoli, Gaza, Chernobyl, Lebanon: a litany of horror. Armed with his camera, photojournalist Sergey Ponomarev has documented some of the most devastating stories of conflict and human suffering of the last decades.

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“The rebels didn’t have a lot of arms or fighters,” says Ponomarev. “But they had snipers and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. If they saw a tank, a sniper would hit a small hole in the tank’s armour and an RPG man would try to hit the same spot so the RPG would go deeper into the tank and explode. The tanks suspected that, in every window, every hole in the wall, there were snipers. So the tactic of the Syrian army was to shell every suspected window.” (Sergey Ponomarv)

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Syrian refugees sleep in commute train as they travel across #Macedonia from southern to north border… https://t.co/eRiUiHyx96

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Syrian refugees sleep in commute train as they travel across #Macedonia from southern to north border… https://t.co/eRiUiHyx96

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Syrian refugees sleep in commute train as they travel across #Macedonia from southern to north border… https://t.co/eRiUiHyx96
— Sergey Ponomarev (@SergeyPonomarev) August 26, 2015

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Syrian refugees sleep in commute train as they travel across #Macedonia from southern to north border… https://t.co/eRiUiHyx96

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Syrian refugees sleep in commute train as they travel across #Macedonia from southern to north border… https://t.co/eRiUiHyx96

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Syrian refugees sleep in commute train as they travel across #Macedonia from southern to north border… https://t.co/eRiUiHyx96