….who is one of two possibilities for my first course photo story assignment. Hamed is from Darfur and arrived in Liverpool in a container ship in 2005, weak and ill after a month at sea with no idea where he was going. He had escaped his country through Port Sudan after his village – including his entire family – were slaughtered by the notorious Janjaweed militia. After at first being refused asylum and ending up destitute and homeless, he is back in the system with a fresh application and is waiting to find out if he will be allowed to stay in the UK.  Friends of his from his country have waited eight and nine years before being granted refugee status.

Anyway, Hamed and I have met briefly a couple of times before and he kindly let me drop around to his flat and tag along with him into town today. He has a fascinating story but reflecting it in images is going to be tough. Jotting down a rough shooting plan as we’ve been asked was a useful exercise because it made me really reflect on where there is and isn’t visual potential in this story….although I’m still not sure about the answer. Focusing on one person may well be setting myself up to fail as I think there could be a temptation to be too literal in the images but I’m going to now go away and do some research on how others have gone about telling short one-character picture stories.

I will be seeing and photographing Hamed again later in the week and hopefully tomorrow I’ll make a start on story option two. There may be a danger inherent in hedging my bets in this way but both issues are of interest to me in the broader sense. In Hamed’s case, whether or not he makes the final cut for next week’s tutorial, his story is the second installment of a loose and occasional series on the asylum system – the first being Sofia.