Viewpoint - David Healey

Photography is a powerful tool. We should remember one individual who was an exile, photographer and pioneer

Enjoying a spot of winter light, I came across this inscription on a gravestone in Edinburgh’s Grange cemetery: ‘He came as an unknown refugee and left a respectable citizen’. Human history is a story of migration. Empires were founded by people who moved. Countries have been shaped by people who came from elsewhere to live in them. We have numerous words to describe those who find themselves somewhere other than where they expected to be – for example, refugees, émigrés, expatriates, and economic migrants. Humans do not only experience the pain of exile because of persecution, punishment or flight, but countless humans also feel alienated because of loss, illness, oppression, the breakdown of relations, betrayal and cultural isolation.