Lost Family Portraits

In your series of portraits of Syrian families in a refugee camp in Lebanon, there is an empty space left for family members who had died or were displaced due to the war. What drew you to this area, and what were you aiming to achieve with these portraits?

Basically the idea was that we wanted to give some kind of a voice to the issues of Syrian refugees at a time. As you can imagine, when the world’s media was so saturated with images, nobody was running stories about refugees – not even tragic stories about people dying in the Mediterranean. Nobody was interested any more. So, how do you talk about something like, for example, the Bekaa Valley [in Lebanon], where you have a million refugees, totally forgotten. If people are not running stories about children dying and drowning in the Mediterranean, then how could you expect they’re going to be running stories about forgotten families in the Bekaa Valley?

So, the idea was to come up with something that would do exactly that: a story to get people interested. It was very much a creative process. I had done a lot of work with advertising agencies and one of them was M & C Saatchi, and basically we started a conversation with them about how we could do something about refugees. All the advertising agencies, they always like to do a little bit of charity work on the side. Because I had done a bit of work with them, I had a very good relationship with M & C Saatchi in London, and particularly with one of the executive creative directors. And he said to me, “Dario, I would like to think about the refugees, what can we do, can we