Dominic Nahr: "The Plight of the Yazidis"
By Billy Kung
At the Triennial of Photography Hamburg which opens today, Swiss photojournalist Dominic Nahr, whom we have featured here on this blog seven months ago, will be participating in a group exhibit titled “Refugee Perspectives” alongside two other photographers: Ayman Oghanna, who is London-born of Iraqi descent and Italian Giulio Rimondi. The focus of the exhibit will be an examination of the plight of refugees in the war-torn country of Iraq.
Nahr was in Europe when news of the atrocities committed against the religious minority, Yazidis, by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) broke in August 2014. By luck he happened to be talking to someone from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees agency (UNHCR) and the next thing he knew he was on a plane to Erbil in northern Iraq. “It was like an omen,” he said over a recent phone conversation with me. Nahr spent the following six months on the ground primarily documenting the difficult lives of the Yazidis refugees under the protection of the UNHCR.
