EXODUS

Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar is today the world’s largest refugee camp – a bamboo and plastic-sheet city of nearly a million people, more densely populated than Manhattan. A muddy backwater, overflowing with people with nothing more than their own determination to somehow survive. In need of food, sanitation, medical supplies, medical attention, clean drinking water, and schools. There is even worse to come with the monsoon rains approaching when the risk of landslides and floods that bring diseases such dysentery, typhoid and, worst of all, cholera.

Panos photographer Patrick Brown is an internationally renowned award winning photojournalist, with more than 20 years of experience throughout Asia, with much time spent focusing on Burma and its ongoing troubles with its ethnic minorities. “In August 2017, I began hearing reports from colleagues in Bangladesh that Rohingya were flooding across the border into nearby Cox’s Bazaar. I remember worrying that this was the start of something terrible. Access to Rakhine State has always been severely limited by the Burmese Army – the Tatmadaw, and there was no information at all coming out Rakhine State at that time,” said Brown.

When Brown arrived in Cox’s Bazaar in September 2017 on assignment for UNICEF, he was already hearing horror stories about murder and rape in Rakhine. Nothing, though, could have prepared him for what he saw and continued to see over the weeks that followed. People of all ages, hungry and soiled, exhausted by the 10-day journey by foot, with nothing more than their shirts on their backs. Hundreds of desperate people became thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands.

This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of Nishita Shah of GP Group.