"The Crack" - the field journal of two reporters across Europe
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When two Spanish journalists set out to cover migration into Europe a few years ago, they travelled huge distances around the edges of the European Union. But the story they brought back was a little different to what they were expecting. Clea Broadhurst has more in this week’s international media.
In 2013, two Spanish reporters - photographer Carlos Spottorno and reporter Guillermo Abril - began reporting on migration into Europe. They travelled from Africa to the Arctic.
What they thought would be a story about the migration crisis, turned out to be much more about the causes and consequences of Europe’s identity crisis. They have told their story in a book called 'The Crack', their field journal.
It depicts an encounter with Sub-Saharan migrants in Gurugu Mountain, the rescue of a raft off the coast of Libya, the exodus through the Balkans, NATO tanks on the Byelorussian border, and Arctic forests, where conscripts try to discover their own limits.
The result is halfway between a photobook and a graphic novel - it's not a story based on actual events: these are actual events.
Understanding Europe, that is the message slipping through "The Crack".
After three years working on the story, several covers, dozens of pages in magazines, and a World Press Photo award, the authors have used their 25,000 photographs and 15 notebooks, to give us their account of what is happening on the European Union’s borders today.
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