Ad van Denderen – Go No Go (2003)

Since late 80s to early 00s Ad van Denderen photographed migrants and refugees who were under way to the rich West. He stayed for weeks in squalid pensions in Istanbul, where Pakistanis wait for the human traffickers who will bring them to Greece. He joined police patrols along the border between Greece and Turkey, where it was primarily Sri Lankans who were arrested, and watched how men and women stepped soaking wet from their small boats at night near Tarifa, in Spain, after their rough sea passage from Morocco.

But this previous paragraph is what editors said. Let’s get rid of all the descriptive phrases of the work about this book, because here the compilation of pictures mean a lot. Most of the images represent the ideas we already have in our minds about the process of migration: people forced to go through extreme bad conditions travelling and finding a place to exist in this new environment. Work conditions that are close to slavery, houses that are falling apart or living in the street, the lack of food and water, prisions, a horrible travel where only a few survive. The impressive quality of this book is on the sequence and the phrases that separate each chapter, where a chain of events that weren’t connected before suddenly are brightly followed one by each other, pointing directly at the racist and capitalist politics of the countries pictured here. European borders and political decisions are a burden for the international working class; when they are needed they are exploited in their homecountries, but when they need these rich countries that could feed them they are savagely killed, imprisioned and tortured through police brutality, bureaucracy, a constant harassment and poverty. This book can contain this message; but it depends of you, do you want to see it?

Go No Go is a hard to go through book with pictures took more than 25 years ago that still represent the current situation in matters of migration.

Actes Sud, Arles/Paris, 2003. 210 x 270 mm. Softcover, around 200 pages. ISBN: 2742743936

French edition/first edition. Condition: Very good. All texts in different languages.