Author Archives: Islelanders

July 7, 2014 by Islelanders

I was at the bottom of the clay slopes at Gnejna training for my upcoming expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro on my day off when I received the phone call I’d been expecting for several weeks. It was the AFM’s Operations Room, and they’d just given the order to deploy a patrol boat to rescue a group of irregular immigrants stranded several miles off Malta. Having made prior arrangements with the army to accompany them on a rescue mission at the […]

Categories: Armed Forces of Malta, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Rescue • Tags: Rescue: Armed Forces of Malta; Asylum seekers; migrants; photojournalism; Malta

June 27, 2014 by Islelanders

In keeping with the football mood everyone seems to be in at the moment, here’s another football-related image. I was down at the Marsa Open Centre where the residents were holding their own version of the World Cup, as the 2006 World Cup was being played in Germany. Apart from focusing on the action itself, I was also interested in capturing expressions of the spectators. What I liked about this picture is that it’s not immediately obvious what’s going on […]

Categories: Living in Malta, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Refugee • Tags: football; migrant; Africa; refugees; Marsa Open Centre; Malta; World Cup;

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June 19, 2014 by Islelanders

I was attending this commemorative service organised by the Peace Lab to coincide with World Refugee Day – migrants who had lost family members at sea gathered at the sea’s edge to cast flowers and pray. Some played music on their percussion instruments. Suddenly one man, overcome with despair over the loss of his wife who had drowned when their boat had capsized, flung himself into the water. Colleagues rushed to help him out again. I quickly jumped into position […]

Categories: Asylum Seeker, Living in Malta, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Refugee, Rescue • Tags: World Refugee Day; Refugees; Malta

June 16, 2014 by Islelanders

I took this picture as part of a feature about the residents at the Marsa Open Centre waiting for the first World Cup to be played in Africa in the run up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. I placed myself behind the goal net, focusing on the shoes hanging in the net and waited for the right action to take place on the pitch. I didn’t want something happening right in the goal mouth, as that would […]

Categories: Asylum Seeker, Malta, Photojournalism • Tags: football; migrant; Africa; refugees; Marsa Open Centre; Malta; World Cup;

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June 9, 2014 by Islelanders

When the whole press corps descends onto the base to cover arrivals, we’re usually restricted to a fixed point position which doesn’t give much freedom to get different pictures from each other. However, in this case, only three members of the media, including myself, were present – it was a middle of the night start to the working day – so we were free to pretty much go wherever we wanted as long as we didn’t get in the way […]

Categories: Armed Forces of Malta, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Rescue • Tags: armed forces of malta, Libya, Malta, Photography, photojournalism, Rescue

June 2, 2014 by Islelanders

I felt I needed to get some images from this registration session conducted by UNHCR and attended by some 200 beneficiary of protection about their different options regarding integration, voluntary repatriation or resettlement. The colours of the walls on the staircase and upper landing, as well as the art creations by the schoolchildren who attend school there in the mornings, caught my eye as soon as I walked into the building. I immediately felt they would lend themselves well to […]

Categories: Living in Malta, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Refugee • Tags: Durable solutions; refugees; UNHCR; Malta

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May 28, 2014 by Islelanders

Last October I photographed this young Palestinian boy from Syria – a survivor of the Lampedusa shipwreck which left hundreds dead – as he landed, cold and traumatized, in Malta off a rescue boat. His blond features and blue eyes drew me in the moment I noticed him – I instantly felt I was shooting an incredibly powerful portrait which was also very different from the portraits I get of migrants landing here. About a week later, I met […]

Categories: Armed Forces of Malta, Asylum Seeker, children, Living in Malta, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Refugee, Rescue • Tags: Palestinian; Syria; Boy; refugee; Malta; rescue; school; living in Malta; integration

May 13, 2014 by Islelanders

Shooting with available light, as I normally do even when it’s pretty dark, gives me the opportunity to play with shapes and shadows. The shadows of migrants moving along the ship’s gangway, which was just out of the frame, caught my eye and I opted to include them in the picture to try get a wide shot which was a bit different. Canon EOS 5 Mark III Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM Focal length 35mm Manual exposure f/2.8 1/40 […]

Categories: Armed Forces of Malta, Asylum Seeker, photography, Photojournalism, Rescue • Tags: Malta: Armed Forces of Malta; Malta; Rescue; photojournalism

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May 13, 2014 by Islelanders

I find that visiting the detention centres with a large number of other journalists, cameramen and photographers doesn’t quite work for me, and I have some personal issues with it. The first time it happened, several years ago, it felt like a school trip to the zoo – we weren’t allowed to mingle with the migrants and could only interact and shoot through the fences. Things were better this time round, but the large media presence meant the whole […]

Categories: Asylum Seeker, Detention, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Refugee • Tags: detention; Somali asylum seekers; Malta; Rescue; photojournalism

May 8, 2014 by Islelanders

A colleague at Times of Malta and I had made the arrangements to visit Lyster detention centre a few days earlier, so it was simply luck that we happened to be there when a group of migrants I had photographed overnight arriving in Malta, were brought to the centre for the first time. It was wonderful to see these old friends be unexpectedly reunited right in front of my eyes. Their beaming smiles and laughter are not the sort of […]

Categories: Detention, Living in Malta, Malta, photography, Refugee • Tags: Somali asylum seekers; detention; migration; Malta; Times of Malta

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April 9, 2014 by Islelanders

I had been at this musical integration party for a couple of hours and had very little to show for it. Sometimes things just don’t work out picture-wise. Nevertheless, I kept my eyes open for any opportunities, and as the event was winding down, I spotted this child talking to some Maltese children. I slowly moved closer, sat down on the bench behind them and instantly knew the resulting picture had been worth the long wait. Canon EOS-1D X Canon […]

Categories: children, Living in Malta, Refugee • Tags: Malta, Malta; refugee; integration

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March 31, 2014 by Islelanders

Out on the quay jutting out into Anchor Bay, seawater and spray were splattering us, as the weather was terrible. I wrapped my camera in a plastic bag to try protecting it from the elements. It wasn’t so much the water that worried me – it was the highly corrosive salt. Canon EOS 5D Mark II Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM Focal length 17mm Aperture Priority f/9 1/200 sec ISO 200

Categories: Asylum Seeker, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Refugee, Rescue • Tags: Asylum seekers: child; rescue, Malta, Photography, photojournalism, Rescue, rescue; man; asylum seeker, somalia

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March 31, 2014 by Islelanders

I love shooting in shafts of sunlight when indoors, playing with high contrast and deep shadows.I always take manual exposure readings in this sort of situation. Canon EOS-1D Mark II Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L Focal length 20mm Manual Exposure f/8 1/500 sec ISO 200

Categories: Living in Malta, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Refugee • Tags: Malta; refugee; integration, photojournalism

March 20, 2014 by Islelanders

This was a lucky and hastily grabbed shot as I was walking back to my office from an assignment. Camera was at the ready, as it usually is, I saw what I felt was an interesting scene unfolding in front of me, and I quickly lifted the camera and shot a couple of frames. It’s not perfect, the head of a passer-by in the foreground bothers me a bit, but that’s the sort of thing you’re likely to have to […]

Categories: Armed Forces of Malta, children, Living in Malta, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Refugee • Tags: Malta, Malta; refugee; integration, migration, Photography, photojournalism, police; photography; asylum seekers; Somalia; AFM, somalia

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March 18, 2014 by Islelanders

It was the middle of the night when this man was brought ashore at Marsaxlokk. There was hardly any light at all. I was reluctantly forced to use flash for most of my pictures, but I was able to do without it to get this portrait as a street lamp was casting just enough light on the man’s face as he sat next to the window of the police bus. The mud and dust on the window helped enhanced the […]

Categories: Armed Forces of Malta, Detention, photography, Photojournalism, Rescue • Tags: police; photography; asylum seekers; Somalia; AFM

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March 4, 2014 by Islelanders

Boredom is a major problem faced by detainees in detention centres. I observed this Eritrean man, who wouldn’t give me his name, for a couple of minutes as he stood still against the fence in the courtyard before I approached him to get some pictures. In my mind he looked as though he had been crucified to the fence, so I shot from a low angle to accentuate this. Canon EOS 5D Mark II Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM […]

Categories: Departure, photography, Photojournalism • Tags: detention; Malta; asylum seeker; migrant; Safi Detention Centre; Eritrea

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February 18, 2014 by Islelanders

I was struggling to find something that would make a good picture that was slightly different from the norm as I walked around the World Refugee Day Festival at the Upper Barrakka Gardens in Valletta. It was a bit too early in the evening, things hadn’t really kicked off yet but we needed an early picture for the newspaper. However, a little bit of patience paid off. The interaction between a Maltese woman and an African migrant child was precisely the sort of […]

Categories: children, Living in Malta, photography, Refugee • Tags: asylum seekers; child; Malta;, Malta; refugee; integration

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Mohammed

January 23, 2014 by Islelanders

Mohammed’s eyes The young man was just another of the hundreds of asylum-seekers I’ve photographed arriving in Malta over the years, sometimes disembarking from the boat that rescued them when their rickety vessels ran into trouble while crossing the Mediterranean, or sitting on a bus while waiting to be driven away to police headquarters for processing by immigration officials. But with a momentary glance, all that changed. His gaze straight at me was piercing and haunting, tearing through my camera […]

Categories: Asylum Seeker, Malta, photography, Photojournalism, Rescue • Tags: Malta, Photography, photojournalism, Refugees, rescue; man; asylum seeker