Cesar Dezfuli was born in 1991 in Madrid. Self-taught in photography and having learned his trade as a journalist, he now works as a freelance photojournalist, focusing on humanitarian crisis and international politics. Since 2015, his focus is on the migrant crisis in Europe, with a special attention on the Central Mediterranean migratory route.
On 1st August 2016, 118 people were rescued from a rubber boat drifting in the Mediterranean Sea. Another of the hundreds of boats that have been rescued from this migratory route over the past years. In 2016, when historical records were beaten, 181,436 migrants were rescued safe, while 4,576 lost their lives at sea.
In an attempt to put name and face to this reality, to humanize this tragedy, Cesar Dezfuli carry's out this work of documentation composed of 118 portraits of all the people who travelled on board the same boat, taken minutes after their rescue, once on board of the rescue vessel Iuventa. Their faces, their looks, the marks on their body, their clothes or the absence of it ... reflect the mood and physical state in which they are in a moment that has already marked their lives forever. Documenting it can serve to bring this migration reality closer to those who only observe it from a distance.
