Transit: A Kurdish Teen Fights for Asylum in Norway

Espen Rasmussen, an Oslo-based photographer, has spent seven years documenting displaced people around the world for his Transit project, a multimedia work that includes photography, video, a website, and an exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. Here he tells the story of 17-year-old Rahman, an illegal immigrant from Iran. A reception center in Nesna, in northern Norway, he finds support and a welcoming community. When his application for asylum is denied, however, he is forced to go to work in Oslo without papers. The video blends still images and video by Rasmussen, edited by Anna Stevens at Panos Pictures.

Stills from the video

Rasmussen describes his work on the ongoing Transit project in an interview with the Atlantic Video channel:

I noticed that the mass media often only focused on the wars themselves, and on the stories with a lot of action, and forgot to cover the people left behind after a war had raged, or long, ongoing conflicts that might not be considered interesting enough. It is the same today, in Libya or Egypt; hundreds of photographers go when there is fighting, but when the action has finished and the images are not so in your face, most photojournalists leave the area, even though there are a lot of important stories still to tell.

He and Stevens have also done videos on refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, displaced families in Georgia, and people escaping from Somalia to Yemen.

For more work by Espen Rasmussen, visit http://www.espenrasmussen.com and http://www.transit-project.com. For more videos from Panos Pictures, see http://www.panos.co.uk.