Small Sacrifices

June 10, 2017(Sultanahmet) Istanbul, Turkey

It took me a half hour of contemplation before I worked up the nerve to approach these two children. I’ve improvised portraiture on the streets of downtown Los Angeles and worked within situations that were extremely challenging but these two girls just completely humbled me. It’s an interesting concept, the refugee crisis. Because that’s what it is for most of us: a concept, a theoretical abstract that we read about but have never experienced in person. In Europe refugees are everywhere it seems, at least in major cities. When one considers the theoretical abstraction that these very real people have become to those of us who have not witnessed the phenomenon first hand it is nothing when compared with the deeply scarred reality. These two were put on the street in this spot by their mother to beg all day long, under some scaffolding to shield them from the view of the Turkish police. They do not go to school, and their family home in Syria has been destroyed. Their mother is caretaker, their father still in Syria. The girls speak only Arabic, no Turkish, and even through the thick haze of our language barrier it was clear to me that the eldest was savvy and wise well beyond her chronological age. I stumbled on them, the younger sister of about six sleeping, and the older girl, near 11 years of age, nodding off in clear exhaustion.