For six years, from the spring of 2015 through December 2020, the Danish photojournalist Jacob Ehrbahn returned again and again to the routes, camps, and improvised settlements that mark the refugee passage toward Europe. A Dream of Europe, published by Dewi Lewis in 2021, gathers that sustained attention into a single volume of 296 pages, with 164 colour and 4 black-and-white photographs. The geography is wide — the Mediterranean beyond Libyan waters, border crossings, motorway bridges, disused factory buildings — and the people Ehrbahn photographs are specific: young men, women, children, whole families living in free fall while holding to the hope that brought them this far.
The book’s commitment is not to the statistical overview but to the individual encounter. Ehrbahn works close, at eye level, and the images insist on the ordinary texture of lives under extreme pressure. His visits to the Moria camp on Lesbos are central: in spring 2020 he documented conditions there, where some twenty thousand people lived in primitive circumstances and roughly forty per cent were children, and he returned after the fire that destroyed the camp six months later to record what remained. Interleaved with this hardship are moments of stubborn normalcy — children playing until they forget where they are, young men cooking as well as they can from very little — that complicate any reading of the photographs as pure documentation of suffering.
Ehrbahn’s career has been long and decorated: he joined the Danish newspaper Politiken in 2003, has covered international news and daily life for decades, and has received two World Press Photo awards, repeated honours from Pictures of the Year International, the NPPA, and PDN, and three Danish Photographer of the Year titles. A Dream of Europe is his third photobook, and its square 295 x 295 mm format gives the sequences room to breathe. For collectors interested in photojournalism of migration, the volume stands as a considered, extended account of a defining European period, made by a photographer who stayed with the subject far beyond the news cycle.
A Dream of Europe received an Award of Excellence in the Photography Book of the Year category at POYi 2023 — recognition of how the book’s editing and design carry the work beyond the single frame. It is a record of lives lived at the sharp end of policy, and a reminder that behind every number are people with hopes and dreams.
