Liz Smailes meets photojournalist Greg Constantine to hear about his project Statelessness – Nowhere People

A utilitarian photojournalist’s mission would state that he or she benefits the community by providing a record of the day’s events. For Greg Constantine its more than just one day’s record, it’s about documenting countless life­times and several eras in modern history. His four-year project concentrates on providing tangible documentation of proof that millions of people hidden and forgotten all over the world actually exist.

Based in Bangkok since February 2006, American photographer Greg Constantine is becoming one of the most important photojournalists making some of the most arresting documentary photo­graphs today. As part of a long-term project on a subject many nations regard taboo, he is able to find and photograph outsiders and outcasts of society that feel unwelcome whatever the ground beneath their feet.

His project ‘Nowhere People’ is about minority groups who do not formally belong to any state, and as such, exist  obtaining Kenya national ID
beyond the protection of laws or large organizations such as the UNHCR. Included in this category of people de- cards and passports and face
deprived of a birth certificate or passport are 250,000 Bihari in Bangladesh, 1 million Rohingya in Burma, countless  discrimination on any number
Filipino children in Borneo and numerous civilians in South Nepal excluded on the grounds of originating from the lowest caste in a supposedly caste-less society.

When I met Greg, he had just returned from spending one month in Nairobi with the Nubian community, also part of the global statelessness community. We talked about photography and life in general, and where his love affair with the camera began. His photographs speak for themselves and are sometimes disturbingly intimate and difficult, but it is a joy to listen to Greg speak about voyeurism, curiosity, vulnerability, longing, and humanity.

Finding Common Ground

Greg’s love of photography emerged in his late twenties. Working as a senior buyer for HMV the corporate rat-race got to him and he felt the need to break free, to explore something different. While many in his shoes might choose to sail around the world or hike the Andes, Greg decided he needed to get out of his comfort zone and be forced to adapt to a culture and community that was as foreign as possible to him…the idea of seven months backpacking around Asia ticked all the right boxes.

Taking along his father’s Canon AE-1 camera, Greg traveled throughout Southeast Asia, China, Nepal and a little in the Middle East. It was on this trip that he fell in love with the medium of photography and the idea of story telling through imagery. However, it was through his father’s lens that he was also able to recognize others who shared a common ground with his father.

“When I was just 16 years old, my father had a stroke that left him permanently disa­bled and unable to speak; he was 44 years old at the time. Traveling in those countries I noticed there are specific telling signs that show someone has suffered a stroke and I became fascinated about what it must be like for these people to cope with their handicap in a variety of situations, compared with my father in the west. I went back to America and worked in the music industry again for eighteen months, saving up all my money to return to Asia and really focus on capturing people who had suffered strokes, writing and sharing their stories with an organization in the US, whereby they could also learn from the people I was meeting in Asia”.

It was on this second trip to Asia, this time for eight months, that Greg took the learn-as-you-go approach to becoming a photojournalist, and was faced with the research re­quired as well as the aspects of discovery and exploration that go hand-in-hand with the job. Arriving in Thailand he traveled to Burma where he met a monk in Monywa making traditional medicine to treat people with strokes. The adventures and discoveries have continued from there.

Personal, not political

Since his first foray into photojournalism, Greg has been drawn to the personal stories of those who are embroiled in the larger political scheme of things. When his fiancé received a job offer in Japan, Greg took the opportunity to concentrate on a project that would highlight the plight of North Korean refugees. It was a project that won Greg his first awards and it was exhib­ited at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, in Washington DC and also in the National Assembly building in Seoul. Many of the subjects depicted were escaping China and on their way to South Korea, and their situation and experiences were the catalyst for his current work on statelessness.

“While researching and working on that project in Japan, I met women who had given birth during their journey, which meant there were hundreds of new born babies with no identity or formal documentation. Both China and countries in SE Asia do not offer birth rites, only when that baby would set foot on South Korean soil might new generations be recognized, and there was no way of telling how or when that might ever happen.

“This then had me questioning how the child would receive its education, would there be any schooling available? What is its identity? Will that person ever have a voice to vote in the county? What about the families they would eventually create? A whole set of questions began spiraling on that project which led to the work I am doing now.”

The public reaction to that exhibition in Washington revealed Greg was not alone in his questioning, but through discussions with human rights organizations it was revealed he was the only photographer working on this kind of project. Approaching the subject not from the political aspects of the situation, but focusing on the personal stories and what they mean for a whole community of unrecognized people growing larger by the day, it was a path no other photographer was taking.

Patience and time

The seed had been planted with Greg, and he knew he had to nurture it. Since then, over the last three years he has found first and second generations forming communities hidden in the back corners of the world, millions of nobodies with no officially recognized identity. When not out in the field spending weeks and months capturing their lives, proving their existence, Greg is writing proposals and submitting material to receive funding for the next portion of his project. He leaves no stone unturned and will contact every recommended name or organization that might take an interest in the nowhere people and his work.

Many of these stateless people are among the world’s poorest citizens and without citizenship they often have no right to schooling, health care or property ownership. They are deprived of a voice to vote with, stripped of freedom to travel outside their countries and in some cases they are restricted to the towns where they live.

“One of the things which fascinates me in my research is the connection between their situation with historical aspects. They are stateless for many reasons — migration, refugee flight, racial or ethnic exclusion…the quirks of history — but human rights groups tend to focus on the politics — traf­ficking, exploitation, discrimination — rather than the root of those condi­tions, their statelessness,” explains Greg.

Getting to the roots of those conditions means Greg spends much of his time in the worst possible living conditions you can imagine, listening for hours and days peeling away the layers to gain someone’s trust that will open up another window, door or alley to tell their story. There are no short cuts in the working process that allows him to earn friendship and collaboration with strangers all over the world.

“All the people I meet want their stories to be told, but it takes time and patience to get it out of them, and I am a pretty patient guy,” says Greg with an engaging smile. “If it takes me three, four or five days of talking with people, and that’s all I am doing, then I know there will be some kind of breakthrough that will eventually allow me to be invited into a very personal area of their life.”

Tangible Dimensions

The result is a portfolio of work evoking personal diaries of his experiences with people and places that are only encountered in the outskirts of towns or under cover of darkness. In each body of work, Greg Constantine forces us to regard — from often uncomfortably close vantage points — situations and people that most of us would avoid at all costs. Yet, what he reveals is tenderness, beauty, and common humanity.

“There are certain groups that I photograph, I don’t think their situations will change in the short-term, because they are in such desperate situations and there is too much for the international community to lose by helping these people. All I can hope is that my work ends up exposing more of their stories.

“For other groups, they are resting on the cusp of belonging to a place they have been denied of for generations. There has been some incredible work done by academics and human rights workers, but because statelessness is such a legal issue, so much of the human side of the story hasn’t been ex­posed. I really view my role as exposing that human side of the story and what I hope my work can do, is to provide ammunition and evidence for those organizations that are ultimately the ones responsible for making the change and the ones who are actually in the roles to make changes for these people. I can’t do that, but I can provide documentation to combine with all the legal research and information that is needed to revise policies that will ultimately benefit these communities that today are made up of nowhere people.”

To see more of Greg’s work or if you wish to
contact him, please visit his website
www.gregconstantine.com