Spuren der Flucht - Migration I Mauern I Menschenwürde

For seven years, photojournalist Klaus Petrus has been documenting escape routes across the Balkans to EU member states. On these journeys, he has lived with migrants in shacks, traveled with smugglers, crossed borders illegally with refugees, documented the violence of border police - and despite everything, experienced a great deal of humanity.

Migration is not only the big issue of our time, but also one that threatens to divide society into those for and those against - there is hardly any room for nuance. Klaus Petrus puts himself on an equal footing with refugees and uses his black and white photographs and stories to show the everyday lives of people on the run and thus the normality of a situation that is anything but normal.

There is the story of Afghan Khalil, for example, who is thinking about returning to his home country after 1000 days on the run, of an Iraqi who is paying off his debts as a smuggler, or of 70-year-old Samira from Pakistan, who has been stuck in Bosnia with her grandson for years. However, he not only encounters tragedy and hopelessness, but also many bizarre stories, moments of happiness, love and hope. Klaus Petrus' pictures and stories take an unusual look at migration - and really shake up the entrenched image we have of refugees.

Klaus Petrus

Klaus Petrus was a philosophy professor at the University of Bern until 2012. He then set off for the crisis regions of the world: Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, South Sudan, Ukraine. And again and again to the Balkan route, where he has been documenting stories of refugees since 2016. Since then, he has worked as a photojournalist and reporter. He reports on poverty, exclusion, migration and wars in Switzerland, the Balkans, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2022, Klaus Petrus received the Swiss Press Photo Award for his long-term project on migration. In 2023, his book "Am Rand" was published with reportages and portraits of people on the margins of our society.