Jason Florio "Destination Europe"

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During 2015 and 2016, I was assigned to document the work of MOAS, an NGO rescue ship specifically set up to save the lives of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe.

Since 1998 I have lived on and off in The Gambia, West Africa. During my stays in The Gambia, I regularly met the friends and relatives of young men and women, who had left for or drowned in the Mediterranean while trying to take ‘the back way’ - as the illegal route to Europe through Libya as it is colloquially called - in search of work, greener pastures, and sometimes just out of youthful curiosity.

Initially, my embed with MOAS was ‘just another assignment,’ but soon we were rescuing not only Somalis, Sudanese, and Nigerians fleeing conflicts, but many Gambians escaping a dictatorship and poverty, which I was all too familiar [with ] from my time there. My work quickly began to take on an added personal role, when among the first group of rescued Gambians I met 18-year-old Sana Colley, who was the son of a friend of mine back in The Gambia.

Encounters with rescued Gambians with whom, I had close personal ties continued to occur. Wherever possible I would call their relatives back in The Gambia, from onboard the ship, to inform them [that] their loved ones were safe. My initial embed was for three weeks, but I was soon so emotionally invested in the story that I stayed on for multiple sea missions spanning two years.

Having left my own country nearly thirty years prior in search of a ‘new life,’ I did not see the Africans and especially the Gambians I met at sea as ‘other’ or defined by their temporary status as ‘migrants,’ but as fellow travelers on the paths that were intersecting mine. I see the work not just as a document of Europe’s ‘migration crisis,’ as the photographs have also taken on the added significance of souvenirs. Many of the ‘travelers’ contact me for pictures of their rescues to send to family and friends, as a visual reminder of their journey to a ‘new life.’

~ Jason Florio