Espen Rasmussen writes: ”In 2012 with Dewi Lewis Publishing, I pub­lished my book Transit, a seven-year-long jour­ney around the world, doc­u­ment­ing the lives of refugees and dis­placed peo­ple. I trav­eled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, to Syria and Yemen. I met peo­ple escap­ing vio­lence and war in Colombia, Serbia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and Chad. And I fol­lowed Rahman, a young boy liv­ing in Norway as an undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grant with no papers, for a peri­od of two years. The book is about sur­vival: how human beings are able to adapt and cope in sur­round­ings that for most of us are impos­si­ble to live in. I spent most of the time talk­ing to peo­ple, inter­view­ing them, and doc­u­ment­ing their every­day life as refugees and dis­placed peo­ple. In this edi­tion of VII Interactive Book Club, I take you through the process of doc­u­ment­ing refugees and dis­placed peo­ple around the world. I dis­cuss how this project start­ed as a sin­gle sto­ry, devel­oped into a long-term project, and end­ed up as a book. I also talk about the edit­ing process of the Transit book and the work lead­ing up to a major exhi­bi­tion at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.” Espen is still work­ing on Transit, con­tin­u­ing to doc­u­ment refugees and dis­placed peo­ple.

This lec­ture was orig­i­nal­ly host­ed at VII Interactive, a new resource for shar­ing insights and infor­ma­tion on the craft of visu­al sto­ry­telling. We are build­ing dif­fer­ent plat­forms with­in the VII ecosys­tem, where the pub­lic can engage direct­ly, online with a live instruc­tor. VII Interactive offers pro­gram­ming that is free and avail­able to every­one, in addi­tion to paid class­es and indi­vid­ual men­tor­ing that can be fash­ioned to your needs.