London based Dario Mitidieri began his career, working for The Sunday Telegraph and for The Independent newspapers. In 1989, Dario travelled to China to document the student’s’ demonstration in Tiananmen Square. For his work he was awarded British Press Photographer of the Year, and recognized worldwide as one of the top emerging photojournalists. In 1994 his book “Children of Bombay” was published in six languages, the result of a year long project about the lives of street children in Bombay. Described in French Photo Magazine as one of the ten most important photographic books of the decade, Children of Bombay has given a voice to children who occupy the very bottom rung of India’s social ladder. In the years that followed, Dario photographed the Kobe Earthquake, Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna’s last race, the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Iraq, the Tsunami in Indonesia as well as working on projects such as Children in Wars, Charismatic Evangelism, Hedonism in Ibiza and Teenage Pregnancy in the UK. His latest project, Lost Family Portraits, has received critical acclaim and has been used extensively both in print and on social media worldwide.
Italian-born, London-based photographer Dario Mitidieri sought to record the impact of war and mass migration on the Syrian families left behind using the long-established conventions of family portraiture to show the presence of absence. Working in the refugee camps of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, on the Syrian Border he creates images of families in which an empty chair or counterintuitive space in the grouping represents family members lost to war. The use of the backdrop in the midst of camp life acknowledges the presence of the photographer and reminds us we are looking at a photograph of people rather than the people themselves, yet the family portrait motif is universal as is the pathos of this challenge to it.
Dario Mitidieri, “Lost Family Portraits”. Campaign was shot for CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development), in connection with the agency M&C Saathic London / Dario Mitidieri, “Lost Family Portraits”.
