Released 31st November, 2024 // 64 pages // 978-1-916938-42-7 // RRP: £12.99
The Southern Eye: Co-Seeing Displacements delves into the layered and poignant experiences of refugees, intertwining photography and prose to explore themes of memory, identity, and belonging. The book is a collaborative effort, blending the perspectives of Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, migration scholar Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and photographer Saiful Huq Omi. Through powerful imagery and reflective narratives, the authors navigate the complexities of displacement, capturing moments that reveal the human condition in the face of loss and survival. This work not only documents the visible traces of refugee life but also evokes the unseen emotional landscapes that shape the lived experiences of those who are displaced.
PRAISE for The Southern Eye:
Revisiting this book is far from nostalgia’s predictability. It is possible that everyone in these pictures, and the objects, and the scenery, might already, or soon, be wiped out. Yet, crucially, this book is part of the strong continuity that arises from imaginative co-creation and co-curation. The South-South gaze, between Rohingya and Palestinian, brilliantly undoes the traps and theories of photography as the record of an instant, a snap, a capture, or a document. Here is the grain of activity in the camp. The accompanying text weaves images into stories, making each scene an archive of the past and the future: the kind of past that might have kept happening, the kind of future that could be. Together, word and image extend life beyond the frame. The frame is there to invite us to think beyond limits and parallels. The Southern Eye makes me want to look again and again. Like rain into the veins of the earth, it feeds and waters an intimate vision of our world repeatedly being made possible.
— Anthony Vahni Capildeo
This volume is a beautiful experiment in poetic/pictorial juxtaposition. Comprising extended prose poems and short essays alongside assorted photographs – archival, authorial and amateur – it explores the refugee situation as mediated via text and image while positing South/South synergies and connections. Whether recycled from albums or personal archives, or produced on site and location, this collection of extraordinary and ordinary pictures invokes life-worlds and livings that are both precarious and precious. The carefully crafted words that accompany them constitute a suggestive and extended frame for thinking. They are neither prescriptive nor didactic. They hold, like the photographs themselves, an infinite and exquisite set of possibilities.
— Tamar Garb
The Southern Eye: a collection of photographs and poems moving between the everyday, the urgent and the emergency, fortified by a poetic that is at once as striking as it is necessary.
— Anthony Anaxagorou
Built on a series of encounters between image and text, this unique book compels readers to see both photography and prose in a new light. As you look and read, each image becomes a stanza, whilst words become lenses that refocus our gaze. Interrogating the conditions of seeing and being seen with the warmth of a documentary and the force of a vision, this volume is as intimate as it is resonant, as stirring as it is revealing.
— Daniele Rugo
ABOUT Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, and Saiful Huq Omi:
Yousif M. Qasmiyeh is a Palestinian scholar and poet who was born and educated in Baddawi refugee camp and whose doctoral research at the University of Oxford examined containment and the archive in ‘refugee writing.’ His poetry and prose have appeared in journals including MPT, Stand, PN Review, and Poetry London. His collection, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. His latest book is Eating the Archive (2023, Broken Sleep Books).
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Professor in Migration and Refugee Studies at UCL where she co-directs the Migration Research Unit. She is Principal Investigator of Refugee Hosts and Southern Responses to Displacement, and Joint-Lead (with Yousif M. Qasmiyeh) of the Baddawi Camp Research Lab. Her books include The Ideal Refugees; South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development; The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies; The Handbook of South-South Relations; The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Contemporary Migration; and Refuge in a Moving World.
Saiful Huq Omi is a critically acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, educator, and activist. His photography, films and writing focus on human rights, politics of identity, and displacement. He has published over half a dozen books and has been working on and archiving the Rohingya crisis through photography for over a decade. In 2012, he founded Counter Foto - A Centre for Visual Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which provides world-class photography education with a specialization in human rights and social justice.
