Every day people drown in the Mediterranean, yet images of shipwrecks find their way less and less into mainstream news.
Europe may have become accustomed to the crisis but Owen Thurgate has not. The forester from Wales signed up as a volunteer for a search and rescue mission for the first time last year. Deflating rubber boats, the bright orange of life jackets against the backdrop of a deep blue sea, a father crying for lost loved ones are just some of the images that have been burned into his memory.
Images of boats and camps still prevail because they simplify refugee issues when, for some, the whole picture seems too much to grasp. They eliminate interrelated drivers and contributing factors like climate change, neo-colonial economics or the dilemmas of nation-state sovereignty in a globalized world.
We have taken pictures of Thurgate and his crew aboard the volunteer vessel, Sea-Watch, before and after their mission last May. The portraits are accompanied by some very personal observations by the people themselves. The images and captions give a voice to the volunteers - those who are fighting for a safe passage.
"It was our third day out at sea when I took this little baby girl on my boat. She was called Destiny. Only hours before the rescue, her mother had died on the beach in Libya giving birth. The father had to abandon her dead body in the sand, setting off in the rubber boat without her. I think I just said 'So sorry' to him and felt quite guilty a second later because that triggered something and he began sobbing on my shoulder.
"This story brought it home to me how all of us know that things are going on in the world but we are too busy to get involved. When I heard this man crying, I found you can't just push it to one side anymore. I felt really sad and angry about the injustice and at the same time so frustrated that we couldn't do more. Politicians don't want to be aware of these individual life stories. So it's really good being part of a crowd like Sea-Watch where people care about other human beings."