Yannis Behrakis, 1960-2019
March 3, 2019Reuters
“My mission is to make sure that nobody can say: ‘I didn’t know’.” Award-winning Reuters photographer Yannis Behrakis dies aged 58 after a long struggle with cancer.
“His pictures are iconic, some works of art in their own right. But it was his empathy that made him a great photojournalist.”
A Syrian refugee kisses his daughter as he walks through a rainstorm towards Greece’s border with Macedonia on September 10, 2015. (Reuters/ Yannis Behrakis)
A Syrian refugee holds onto his children as he struggles to walk off a dinghy on the Greek island of Lesbos, on September 24, 2015. (Reuters/ Yannis Behrakis)
A starving Somali child is given water near a refugee camp in Baidoa, Somalia, on December 14, 1992. (Reuters/ Yannis Behrakis)
An ethnic Albanian man places the body of two-year-old Mozzlum Sylmetaj into a coffin next to the coffins of three other family members killed by Yugoslav army troops. (Reuters/ Yannis)
Rebel fighters run for cover inside a building on the frontline in Tripoli street in central Misrata, April 21, 2011. (Reuters/ Yannis Behrakis)
Migrants and refugees beg Macedonian policemen to allow passage to cross the border from Greece into Macedonia during a rainstorm, near the Greek village of Idomeni.
A red sun is seen over a dinghy overcrowded with Syrian refugees drifting in the Aegean sea between Turkey and Greece after its motor broke down off the Greek island of Kos.
Frantic Kurdish refugees struggle for a loaf of bread during a humanitarian aid distribution at the Iraqi-Turkish border.
Songs to be sung.
‘Daring to enter, we are humbled to discover, again and again, that the act of living itself unravels both the answer and the question. When we watch, we remain riddles to be solved. When we enter, we become songs to be sung. When life feels far off, remember that a flute is just something hard with holes until it’s played. So, too, the heart. In this way, the life of every soul waits like sheet music to be played. What good are we if never played?’ -Mark Nepo
︶⁀°••°⁀︶
Blessed are you God of the universe.
You have created us, and given us life.
Blessed are you, God of the planet earth.
You have set our world like a radiant jewel in the heavens,
and filled it with action, beauty, suffering, struggle and hope.
Blessed are you, God of Aotearoa New Zealand
in all the people who live here,
in all the lessons we have learned,
in all that remains for us to do.
Blessed are you because you need us;
because you make us worthwhile,
because you give us people to love and work to do
for your universe, for your world and for ourselves.
- A New Zealand Prayer Book/He Karaikia Mihinare Aotearoa. (1989). p.142