It is well established that if you give someone a fish, they’ll have dinner for one night. Teach someone to fish and they’ll have dinner for the rest of their life.

In 1998, Edinburgh University Social Anthropology students Tiffany Fairey and Anna Blackman established two projects which sought to integrate participatory photography into their MA dissertations. These projects, the Rose Class project in Nepal and the Street Vision project in Vietnam, encouraged and inspired refugees from these areas to capture their everyday lives on film, with cameras supplied by the two projects.

It’s something about the eyes.

In times of conflict, war, rebellion, or natural disaster, it is so often the civilian who suffers, and it is the children who suffer most for they had supposed themselves to have the longest future yet to come. It is not the terrible shock of seeing homes destroyed or parents or siblings killed. It is not just the hunger that eats at the body or the tiredness in that same body; it is the loss of innocence that changes the eyes.