Stephen Kelly, Photographer

In May 2013 I travelled to Sittwe, the capital city of Rakhine State in Myanmar, to carry out a commission for UNHCR. The week before I arrived, a small hurricane had lashed the city, which sits along the coast of the Bay of Bengal. Myanmar’s long and ruthless rainy season was commencing and during my stay, heavy rains began to fall relentlessly.

I had been given a number of assignments to carry out, one of them being to produce a series of family portraits for a World Refugee Day campaign, entitled ‘The Most Important Thing’. I was to photograph both Rakhine Muslim and Buddhist families who had been displaced by the conflict that started in 2012. Each family was to hold the most important item they were able to carry with them, as they fled their homes during the conflict. I spoke with many Rohingya families who all had similar stories about the harrowing moments they had to flee. Many of the families whose homes were engulfed by flames, had no time to collect any belongings, simply escaping with the clothes on their backs.

This photograph of a family standing outside their shelter in the Thae Chaung makeshift camp in Rakhine State is particularly poignant and important, for this exact reason. At the time I remember questioning how I could visually portray the ‘most important thing’ concept when most of these families have nothing. I then realised I needed to embrace this exact point in order to best illustrate their situation.