Emin Ozmen

Biography:
Emin Özmen was born in Sivas, Turkey. He studied Physics at “19 Mayıs University ” in Samsun, before moving on to photographic studies in the Fine Arts Faculty at “Marmara University”, Istanbul. In 2008, thanks to funding from HSBC, he published two photo-books named “Humans Of Anatolia” and “Microcredit Stories in Turkey”, a collection of stories on women who were able to access a microcredit as part of a programme which stretched across 26 cities in Turkey. In 2008 he started his career with Sabah, a major Turkish daily newspaper. In the meanwhile, he obtained a degree in media photography and documentary (photography) at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. In 2011, his work on the drought in Somalia was published by Turkuvaz Books. In the same year he worked on the disaster of the Tohoku Earthquake and on economic protests in Greece. The following year he covered the Syrian civil war and ISIS crises in Iraq. His work has been published by TIME Magazine, The New York Times, BBC, CNN, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Paris Match, Libération, The Telegraph, Bild, to name but a few. Emin Özmen won several awards, amongst them the World Press Photo award and the Prix Bayeux Calvados Public Jury Photo. He currently lives in Istanbul and continues his work as a photojournalist at Agence Le Journal.

Exhibition: Limbo
In June 2015, the UN Refugee Agency announced in its annual report that the number of refugees and displaced people in 2014 reached the record figure of 60 million people. A sad record.

This is a cold, harsh, brutal figure.

Since 2012, Emin Özmen has undertaken a long work of photographic documentation with the populations uprooted by the spiral of conflicts. He has traveled many times to Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Europe to meet people who were forced into becoming “refugees”. Through his work, he has tried to collect their stories and to “capture” their experiences and feelings.

With this series of photographs, Emin Özmen has sought to apprehend the condition of these people whose lives were turned upside down. What he has captured is an abyss of emotions.

The lives of all these people, their stories, their fates seem to hang in a state of inbetweenness where the wait, hope, anxiety, confusion and anguish coexist, clash and confine them to a vague and confused state: the Limbo.

The Limbo. The Limbo is appearant in the feelings reflected on their faces, in their postures, sometimes just glimpsed in a gesture.

We see the expectation and the tension on their faces as they watch their city collapsing under the bombs. Perhaps that one was their house, the one they left in haste.

It is a hard life, lived in refugee camps. There is the fear and the cold sometimes. Waiting, more waiting. There is hope too.

Entire families risk it all to leave on rickety boats, in hope of a better life. Often, they suffer the humiliation. The stare of others, oppressive. Arrests. Indifference. Guilt even, when they leave their families in the hope of finding them later, elsewhere, in a safer place.

And then one day, some return to their city. Dismay come upon them. Dismay upon finding but ruins in place of their former homes. And it’s a deafening silence that settles then.

This photographic series takes us into a territory with blurred borders, where time seems suspended, where the outcome appears uncertain, where everything is still possible.

Through his work, Emin Özmen lets us share the lives, day after day, of those people lost in limbo.

This post is also available in: Turkish