The Europeans is a long-term photo-documentary project exploring how Europe and its people are changing as the European Union continues to expand. An exhibition of the work by the lead photographer for the project Damaso Reyes opens in the Saldahna Gallery, Fort Dunree Military Museum, Inishowen, Donegal on May 2nd and will feature prints as well as multimedia audio-visual pieces. Reyes has spent the last ten years working on the project in European countries including Germany, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Ukraine. His explorations of life in contemporary Europe seeks to unveil the often untold ways in which politics, culture and identity intersect in the lives and communities across the continent.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Damaso Reyes is a photojournalist whose work has appeared in publications including: The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Far Eastern Economic Review, New York magazine, Vanity Fair Germany, Der Spiegel and Time Asia. Previous assignments and projects have taken him to countries including Rwanda, Iraq, Indonesia, Tanzania and throughout the United States. His images are also featured in the monograph Black: A Celebration of a Culture and the book Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers go to War. Reyes is a project leader at the World Policy Institute focusing on migration issues.
He is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including a Fulbright and Arthur F. Burns Fellowship and two first place awards for international reporting from the New York Association of Black Journalists. He is also a 2012 Knight-Luce fellow in Global Reporting on Religion and a 2013 French American Foundation Immigration Reporting Fellow.
Reyes says of The Europeans:“Through images, audio and text I am documenting the evolution of the continent from the perspective of a foreigner. Europe is experiencing its most profound change since the end of the Second World War and for the past ten years I have taken an approach which considers the long view of this grand transformation.”
“This is the work of a singular voice and, by necessity, is neither definitive not comprehensive. It is, in fact, quite idiosyncratic. This is the document of one person's journey through time and space. As such it presents a perspective that I hope the viewer will find somewhat unfamiliar and that these images will encourage discussion. I am very much interested in the idea and debate around just who is, and can become, a European. As the son of immigrants to the United States I see my own journey reflected in the faces and stories of immigrants and their children here in Europe. How Europe chooses to answer its immigration question will very much determine its future.”
“The images I present are not intended to be answers but rather to provoke more questions. How Europeans see themselves, and each other, is at the heart of the debate of what Europe will be. It is a question that only Europeans can answer but in order to do so they must have a view that rises beyond the cliché and seeks to find the connections that the inhabitants of this continent share.”
