In the summer of 2016, César Dezfuli spends three weeks on board the Iuventa, a former fishing boat operated by the German NGO Jugend Retter, where he witnesses the rescue vessel assist people risking their lives on the central Mediterranean migration route, the overseas crossing from Libya to Italy.

On August 1st, 118 people are rescued from a rubber dinghy drifting 20 nautical miles off the coast of Libya. Dezfuli photographs all the passengers on the boat minutes after their rescue, in an attempt to attach names and faces to this reality, to humanize this tragedy.

Their faces, their looks, the marks on their bodies, their clothes or the absence of them, reflect the mood and physical state in which they were in a moment that had already marked their lives forever.

Shortly afterwards, they disembark in Italy, in the Sicilian port of Pozzallo.

César Dezvuli, born in 1991 in Madrid, Spain, in a context of cultural mixture given his Spanish-Iranian origins, Cesar Dezfuli is a journalist and documentary photographer whose work often explores themes related to migration, identity, and human rights.

Self-taught in photography and having learned the profession as a journalist in various newsrooms, Dezfuli’s assignments and personal projects have taken him to document diferent realities worldwide, from covering the elections in Kenya, Rwanda and Kosovo, to documenting families which have gone against China’s one-child policy. Since 2015, his focus has been on the migrant crisis at the borders of Europe, with a special focus on the Central Mediterranean migration route. In 2016, Dezfuli began working on his most renowned project, “Passengers,” with which he aims to question the visual representation of migration.