Anatomy of a Photobook: Fabio Bucciarelli’s ‘The Dream’

8 minute read

For the past five years, Fabio Bucciarelli has been photographing the ongoing refugee crisis across North Africa, parts of the Middle East and Europe in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. As hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees make the dangerous trip with the hope and dream of better lives, the Italian photographer’s goal has been to move beyond the statistics to focus, instead, on the feelings that drive these refugees. The work is published now in a new photobook called The Dream, released by FotoEvidence.

Fabio Bucciarelli speaks to TIME LightBox.

Olivier Laurent: The first thing you notice with The Dream is the unusual choice of packaging. It’s stored in a lifejacket bag. Why did you decide to do this?

Fabio Bucciarelli: The special edition of The Dream is inserted in a “book vest” made by refugees and migrants with the life jackets they used to reach Europe. During the last year, the life jacket has become one of the symbols of this huge crisis. It’s the evidence of the great exodus, a piece of contemporary history that, over time, will become historical memory.

The concept behind this choice is the desire to offer a multi-sensorial experience focused on the humanitarian crisis, preparing the reader to a more intimate view of the book. The need to propose a real, concrete and tactile object runs in parallel with the aim to emphasize the reality of the migrant crisis and strengthen the relationship with the protagonists of the story.

Fabio Bucciarelli's book The Dream
Fabio Bucciarelli's book The Dream

Olivier Laurent: What were the logistics of getting these bags in the first place? Where do they come from?

Fabio Bucciarelli: During the first trip to Lesbos in the summer of 2015, I realized the huge number of life jackets used by refugees to reach the coast of Greece and then abandoned on the beaches. During the winter months, I became aware of the fact that the volunteers of Pika — the small reception center located on the island — were teaching refugees how to create bags and backpacks out of the life jackets. At that moment, I was looking for a “vest” for the book, a symbol that could be connected to the great exodus. So I got in touch with the camp director, Lena Altinoglou, who carried out this project with respect and determination. In March, I returned to Lesbos to work with the staff and the refugees on the prototype of the bag before they could begin commissioning. I am very proud to have them on board of this project.

Olivier Laurent: The Dream covers five years of work. When you started thinking about this book, what was your vision for it?

Fabio Bucciarelli: Five years ago, when the first refugees — migrant workers from Bangladesh and Sub-Saharan countries — were fleeing from the clashes in Benghazi during the Libyan civil war, I began to document their terrible suffering and inhuman condition. Even before the NATO intervention in Libya, hundreds of men and women were fleeing the fightings: a river of souls trapped in the limbo of a foreign nation.

Fabio Bucciarelli's book The Dream
Fabio Bucciarelli's book The Dream

A year later, I found the same frightened glances and broken dreams along the border between Syria and Turkey: Syrian citizens fleeing from violent battles between Assad’s government and the Free Syrian Army. The beginning of a mass exodus that has now seen over seven and a half million Syrians displaced, making the current displacement of people the largest diaspora since the Second World War.

In 2015, concurrent with the growing media interest in the topic, I decided to start working on the book, pursuing the need to propose a different interpretation. I started seeing the entire work done until then from a different perspective. I was looking for humanity in tragedy, I purposely followed a language not just descriptive of the crisis, I developed a reflection focused on the dreams and the hopes of the migrants in opposition to the reality of life itself.

This was when the main idea, and the common thread of The Dream, arose and became the real engine of the trip: the dream of running away from the war, the dream of a new life, the dream of having a family, the dream of finding a job.

See Refugees and Migrants as They Sleep on Their Way to Europe

Dreaming Europe
A man from Syria sleeps on a local train that, crossing Macedonia, carries him from Gevdelija, on the Macedonian-Greek border, to Tabanovce on the Serbian border. The journey lasts approximately 5 hours. Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A man from Bangladesh sleeps on the local train, traveling from Gevdelija on the Macedonian-Greek border, to Tabanovce, on the Macedonian-Serbian border. Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A woman from Syria rests on a bus crossing Serbia, bringing her from the Macedonian north border to Belgrade, Serbia’s capital city. Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A man from Bangladesh sleeps on the local train, traveling from Gevdelija on the Macedonian-Greek border, to Tabanovce, on the Macedonian-Serbian border. Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A young Iraqi man falls asleep on the train, on the journey from Gevdelija to Tabanovce.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A young Syrian girl sleeps in a temporary structure erected by UNHCR at the train station of Tabanovce, on the Macedonian-Serbian border.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A Syrian man sleeps on the local train, traveling from Gevdelija, on the Macedonian-Greek border, to Tabanovce, on the Macedonian-Serbian border. Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A man from Bangladesh sleeps on the local train, traveling from Gevdelija on the Macedonian-Greek border, to Tabanovce, on the Macedonian-Serbian border. Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A man from Syria sleeps on the local train that from Gevdelija, on the Macedonian-Greek border, will bring him to Tabanovce, on the Serbian border.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
An Iraqi boy sleeps on the local train that travels from Gevdelija, on the Macedonian-Greek border, to Tabanovce on the Serbian border.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A young Syrian girl sleeps in a temporary structure erected by UNHCR at the train station of Tabanovce, on the Macedonian-Serbian border.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Dreaming Europe
A woman from Nigeria sleeps on the local train that travels from Gevdelija, on the Macedonian-Greek border, to Tabanovce on the Serbian border. Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo

Olivier Laurent: How do you bring together such a massive amount of work in a few hundred pages? Did you work with an editor? How did you select the images?

Fabio Bucciarelli: Over the years I have photographed with several cameras, including a pinhole camera: a simple camera, made of cardboard, created specifically for this project. Using my Pinolina, I made dreamlike images whose aim was not to describe reality, but to allow the viewer to connect with the protagonists, giving shape to the refugee’s emotions and offering a beat, a rhythm for the book.

In the last months of 2015, I started working on the book, looking at thousands of digital and analogue photographs I had taken over the last five years. I decided to isolate myself for two months in my house in Pineto, which became a mini newsroom. With the help of my assistant Alessandro Falco and my post producer Eduardo Matas, I worked for about two months on the book, from the creative process to the design and postproduction.

After a short time, we had selected 1,500 photographs. I printed and stuck them on the walls of different rooms to have a global view of the project and be able to work on the different ideas that could make up the book. Day after day, analyzing the different levels of meaning of the images when juxtaposed with each other, the narrative structure of The Dream took shape.

Weeks later, I met up with my friend and editor Svetlana Bachevanova of FotoEvidence (the publisher of The Dream) and the book designer to finish the book and work on the cover.

Olivier Laurent: The book uses different layout options – for example, some images are blended into each others. You also make use of blank spaces and fold-out pages. Can you explain your thinking?

Fabio Bucciarelli: During the production of the book, I made use of various techniques to encourage the reader to investigate the migrant’s condition, including photographic sequences, color images, diptychs and collages.

The Dream wants to put a face to the numbers, reveal the full emotional spectrum of the migrants, restore their dignity and scream to the world their universal right to dream of a better future regardless of one’s origins, education or social affiliation. This means I had to remove the space-time references and captions, so that the book would not differentiate between migrants and refugees, thus forcing the viewer to focus on the human.

In the first part of the book, through a symbolic and dreamlike language, the reader is taken into a dream world, where memories and hopes appear to flash in the mind of migrants, resulting in an unconscious sentimental journey. Turning the pages, step by step, the book evolves and the reader is catapulted into reality; a reality that for refugees and migrants is completely different from a dream, way tougher and full of pain. The photojournalistic images start to take the upper hand leading us into a vortex of reality, from the arrivals, the camps and the funerals.

The aggravation of their condition makes the characters exhausted, so much so that they slowly return to sleep, eager to return to the dream, creating a cycle in the book that is a metaphor for their lives, caught between dreaming of a new life and their reality. The book ends with still life images of the objects that belonged to the refugees died during the route to reach Lampedusa.

For example, on these two pages, the dream of the Syrian boys who recently fled the war and who now share a moment on the roof of an hotel in Mersin, Turkey, is opposed to the reality of an African migrant who just landed at the port of Catania and raided by the Italian authorities.

Fabio Bucciarelli's book The Dream
Fabio Bucciarelli's book The Dream

Olivier Laurent: Looking back at the production of this book, is there anything you’ve learned that changed the way you look at or shoot photography?

Fabio Bucciarelli: I see photography as a communicative tool to create awareness.To document the refugee crisis, I decided to embark on a narrative experiment, between photojournalism and fine-art photography. A lucidly dreamlike photographic story for a book that comes to light at a time when the refugee crisis is a major contemporary issue, often documented by the media in an impersonal and sensationalistic way, generating indifferent, if not hostile, public opinion toward migrants.

After years spent documenting the causes and consequences of conflicts, I felt the need to use a new language to propose a humanist approach to the refugee crisis, far from the news.

Fabio Bucciarelli’s The Dream is available now. Follow him on Instagram @thedream_project.

Refugees at the port in Augusta, Italy after arriving, June 20, 2015. This photo was taken with the pinhole camera 'Pinolina' .
Refugees at the port in Augusta, Italy after arriving, June 20, 2015. Fabio Bucciarelli —MeMo
War wreckage in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria, Oct. 2012.
War wreckage in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria, Oct. 2012.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
A Syrian woman looks at the sea in Kizkalesi, Turkey, while waiting to board a ship heading further north in Europe, Jan. 29, 2015. More than 3,000 refugees and migrants drowned in the Mediterranean in 2014 fleeing conflict-torn regions, and more than 3,700 died in 2015.
A Syrian woman looks at the sea in Kizkalesi, Turkey, while waiting to board a ship heading further north in Europe, Jan. 29, 2015. More than 3,000 refugees and migrants drowned in the Mediterranean in 2014 fleeing conflict-torn regions, and more than 3,700 died in 2015.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
A field with clothes left by migrants in a camp near Benghazi, Libya Feb. 27, 2011.
A field with clothes left by migrants in a camp near Benghazi, Libya Feb. 27, 2011.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
The Kawergosk refugee camp in Northern Iraq where tens of thousands of Kurds live after fleeing fighting between radical Islamic groups and YPG (People's Protection Units) in the Kurdish Syrian Rojava region, Oct. 8, 2013.
The Kawergosk refugee camp in Northern Iraq where tens of thousands of Kurds live after fleeing fighting between radical Islamic groups and YPG (People's Protection Units) in the Kurdish Syrian Rojava region, Oct. 8, 2013.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
A double page from The Dream: At left; African migrants register at the port of Messina, Italy, July 22, 2015. At right; Refugees recharge their phones after the long sea journey, Augusta, Italy, June 20, 2015,
A double page from The Dream: At left; African migrants register at the port of Messina, Italy, July 22, 2015. At right; Refugees recharge their phones after the long sea journey, Augusta, Italy, June 20, 2015,Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
A Sudanese refugee is searched by police after landing at the Sicilian port of Catania, Italy, June 16, 2015.
A Sudanese refugee is searched by police after landing at the Sicilian port of Catania, Italy, June 16, 2015.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
The Dream
Young Syrian refugees in Mersin, Turkey, where refugees wait before taking boats heading further north in Europe, Jan. 29, 2015.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
The Dream
Refugees and migrants arrive on the Greek Island of Lesbos, Oct. 11, 2015, after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Double page from The Dream - a collage showing hands of recent arrivals to Europe.
Double page from The Dream - a collage showing hands of recent arrivals to Europe.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
A Syrian family after arriving to the Greek island of Lesbos, Oct. 10, 2015. .
A Syrian family after arriving to the Greek island of Lesbos, Oct. 10, 2015. Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Refugees, largely from Syria and Afghanistan, travel by train through Macedonia Aug. 27, 2015.
Refugees, largely from Syria and Afghanistan, travel by train through Macedonia Aug. 27, 2015.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Afghan refugees wait to be registered on the Greek island of Lesbos, Oct. 12, 2015.
Afghan refugees wait to be registered on the Greek island of Lesbos, Oct. 12, 2015.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Double page from The Dream: Refugees travel by boat to reach Europe, at right, a boat is intercepted by the Italian Coast Guard and led to the port of Lampedusa, Italy on Feb. 20, 2011.
Double page from The Dream: Refugees travel by boat to reach Europe, at right, a boat is intercepted by the Italian Coast Guard and led to the port of Lampedusa, Italy on Feb. 20, 2011.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
An Italian Red Cross doctor uses an electronic thermometer to take the temperature of a boy during the medical exam at the port of Messina, Italy, July 2015.
An Italian Red Cross doctor uses an electronic thermometer to take the temperature of a boy during the medical exam at the port of Messina, Italy, July 2015.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
A young Syrian girl sleeps at the train station in Tabanovce, at the Macedonian-Serbian border, Aug. 30, 2015
A young Syrian girl sleeps at the train station in Tabanovce, at the Macedonian-Serbian border, Aug. 30, 2015Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
A mobile phone that belonged to a migrant deceased during a Oct. 3, 2013 shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Nearly 200 victims remain unidentified, Milan, Italy - Sept. 30, 2015.
A mobile phone that belonged to a migrant deceased during a Oct. 3, 2013 shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa. From which, nearly 200 victims remain unidentified, Milan, Italy - Sept. 30, 2015.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo
Two ten euro banknotes recovered from a migrant deceased in the Oct. 3, 2013 shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Nearly 200 victims remain unidentified, Milan, Italy, Sept. 30, 2015.
Two ten euro banknotes recovered from a migrant deceased in the Oct. 3, 2013 shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa. From which, nearly 200 victims remain unidentified, Milan, Italy, Sept. 30, 2015.Fabio Bucciarelli—MeMo

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