Press photography commissions

Words and images by James Vellacott.

Although I regularly enjoy a photographic flirt in the studio, my true calling has always been press photography. I recently had such a commission for Live magazine. It was to travel to Greece to capture images showing the influx of Afghan immigrants making their way to the UK looking for a better life.

I met reporter Chris Rogers to plan our trip a week before. He had been liaising with a couple of aid agencies looking for case studies involving Afghan families in Greece.

Afghan immigrants favour Greece as a destination to start their journey across Europe as it is in the EEC and will not turn them back if they have made it to Greek territory. The Greek island of Samos is also only 800 meters from Turkey and an obvious crossing point if you can dodge the coastguards.
Our first destination was Athens. This is where many illegal immigrants congregate to get temporary permission to stay in Greece. There are many houses and hostelries that are home to the Afghans until they find a way to get to Italy. On our arrival we met a local aid agency worker who took us to an Afghan community in a less salubrious part of the ancient city. We concentrated on a family who lived in a basement underneath a town house with his family and friends. I used my Canon 5D mark 2 with a 16-35mm to shoot them standing in the doorway underneath the main property.


I then met 21-year-old Abdul Shinare and 19-year-old Borhan Tanha. These fellows, both from Afghanistan had just arrived in the Capital and were sleeping rough on an old mattress in a side street. I shot them using the Quantum Qflash and balanced it for the available street lighting in the nighttime scene; they were a little disorientated and seemed to be traveling with no plan or money.


Our journey then took us down to the island of Samos. Afghans pay large amounts of money to traffickers who arrange small inflatable boats with outboard motors as transportation. Dozens of immigrants cram themselves into these boats and make their way across the small straight that separates Turkey from Greece. Most of these people make it to the Greek mainland avoiding the coastguard but occasionally they are stopped as they cross. To avoid being disallowed entry, the occupants deliberately puncture the inflatable boat forcing the coastguard to rescue them and take them on to Greece; it’s a well-practiced method if you are caught.


We spent a night on a Samos beach surrounded by life jackets and punctured inflatable boats used by previous beach arrivals. The clear starry skies were perfect for a long exposure showing the beach and the discarded jackets and transportation. With a 30 second exposure and a gentle wave of my iphone to illuminate the foreground, it made a moody night lit image of what it must be like for them arriving in the small hours.


After arrival the immigrants make their way to Samos town where they are picked up by the local police and taken to a holding center before being shipped up to Athens for processing. The Greek authorities allowed us entry to the razor wired holding centre where, with the approval of the immigrants, we interviewed and photographed new arrivals being searched and supplied with wash kits and food parcels.

Our next destination was the Greek port of Patras, a two-hour drive from Athens. The immigrants hang around the port waiting to climb under trucks being loaded onto ferries to Italy. We hired a sixth floor room in a building overlooking the port and waited for the daily groups of immigrants to arrive from their camps on the outskirts of the town, hoping to climb over the razor wired fence and hide in between the axles of an outbound waiting lorry.

I had set up a 400mm lens with a x2 converter and sure enough a group of Afghans arrived watching a truck on the port side of the fence. One of them then climbed up the razor wire and pulled himself over the top. I fired off a few frames. At six floors up he did not notice me as he ran under the waiting lorry. He had been spotted by the port police and in minutes a police car turned up and two officers pulled him out and took him into custody. The sequence made a good set of images demonstrating the risks these people to travel to the UK. Later on reporter Chris and I drove out to one of the camps to talk to the travelers. We spoke to a group of six very polite and friendly Afghans who told us that they were heading to meet friends in the UK. During the interview they told us that they were in danger back in Afghanistan and had sold their homes and farms to fund the move to the UK. They said that they held the Brits partly responsible for their migration due to the ongoing war there.

The pictures from that day, being taken six floors up, showed immigrants climbing fences but due to the high angle you could not see them climbing under the lorries. I decided the following day that I would wait at ground level and try for some shots of them climbing up under the trucks. Again, after a couple of hours I photographed one Afghan climbing over the fence and squeezing between the wheels of an articulated truck. He spent some time ducking around the undercarriage looking for a place to fit in. On the 400mm I could shoot through the razor wire and get a clean shot of him looking out between the wheels. This again showed the risks an Afghan would take to get to Great Britain.


We spent eight days in Greece and spoke to many traveling immigrants, all of which believed there was a better life waiting for them in the UK. Many of them appeared to have legitimate reasons for leaving Afghanistan, with that; there were clearly people who think that the UK immigration laws are a soft touch and were hoping to be given a home to live in and money to live off. I felt that Chris’ article in Live magazine along with my photographs, gave a balanced view as to the immigration issues in Europe and the UK.