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Humans of New York photographer captures the humanity of the 'swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean'

Oct 11, 2015, 18:30 IST

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A Syrian migrant holds his child at a temporary refugee camp in Gabcikovo, Slovakia, October 8, 2015. Slovakia offered to temporarily house up to 500 refugees seeking asylum in Austria.David W Cerny/Reuters

The UK's Prime Minister, David Cameron, recently faced heavy criticism for referring to refugees coming to Europe as "a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean."

But despite the backlash against Cameron, the public and politicians often fail to acknowledge the humanity at the core of the migrant crisis.

Enter Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind the hugely popular Humans of New York blog that gained popularity on Facebook and has now gathered more than 15 million likes.

In partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Stanton recently visited various Greek islands as well as Austria, where he took pictures of refugees and UNHCR workers. Applying the same technique as he does in New York, Stanton posted portraits accompanied by a snippet from the people's lives.

Doing that, he managed to put a human face to a crisis involving millions of people.

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Over the years, Stanton has already branched out and traveled to Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Ukraine, Vietnam, and many other countries to document the lives of locals there.

His latest expedition, however, and the resulting images combat the tendency to refer to the refugees as masses instead of individual people with stories and a reasons for abandoning their homes.

In one of the stories, a woman tells of how she and her husband gave all of their money to a smuggler, who then forced them onto a small, unsafe boat which sank between Turkey and Greece.

While the woman was eventually rescued, her husband is one of the over 3,000 people who died so far this year trying to cross the Mediterranean, according to the UNHCR.
PostbyHumans of New York.

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