Jim Lommasson

Artist Statement

My What We Carried projects are an effort to provide a platform for refugees, genocide, and Holocaust survivors to tell their own stories. I began my first collaborative photography/storytelling project in 2010 called “What We Carried: Fragments and Memories from the Cradle of Civilization” with Iraqi and Syrian refugees who fled their homes after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I photographed the few precious items that participants managed to carry with them on their long and dangerous journey to America. I then asked the participant to write directly on the photograph about their carried memento and the object’s importance. The luminous inner life of these ordinary “things” became a testament to the unspeakable anguish of a life left forever behind. Ordinary objects became sacred.

What would you take? What is left behind?

The photographs submitted to the Blue Sky Drawers include photo/writings by immigrants, refugees, genocide and Holocaust survivors.

Jim Lommasson | Eugene, OR