They are the eyes and ears of Islamic Relief in the field. They provide us with powerful images and help people tell their stories to the world. This World Humanitarian Day, meet the humanitarians who stand behind the lens.
They choose where to point the lens. They conduct interviews in sensitive settings and dangerous environments. They help people tell their own stories — stories that can challenge perceptions, expose injustice, shape public debate and inspire action from global policy makers.
On the day of the year that we set aside to honour aid workers, they are the easiest to overlook because their whole craft is to stay out of the picture and behind the lens.
Every photograph of a distant crisis that we feature, was captured by our expert media and communications officers. These are not people who parachute in and leave.
More often than not, they are from the country they photograph. Sometimes the street they are photographing is the street where they grew up.
Maysa Adam, Communication Coordinator for Islamic Relief Sudan, has spent years photographing families living through conflict and displacement.
“Listening to people and their stories has helped me carry my own. I hear what someone has lived through and I think, I would not have survived that. And still they smile for the camera. Only I know the strength behind that smile. Their journeys remind me to count my blessings, and they keep me sharing their voices with the world.”
Some of what these photographers are up against never shows on camera. In Somalia, Senior Communication and Information Coordinator Awil Abukar Mohamed spends his days trying to capture a disaster that moves too slowly to see.
“A drought does not explode. It comes one failed harvest at a time. There is no single terrible moment for the camera. So how do I make you care about something that is happening quietly?”
In the Philippines, Advocacy & Communications Officer Hanaan Abdulwahab has photographed one storm after another. Her most recent was Super Typhoon Uwan, during which she moved through flattened neighbourhoods as families began to rebuild.
“Every time I raise my camera, I remember there is a person on the other side of it who has trusted me. Behind a collapsed home is a family with memories and hopes for tomorrow. My job is to honour that trust, to show what was lost and what is still standing in them. If one photograph makes a stranger care enough to act, the day in the field was worth it.”
In a single week the same person takes the photographs, translates an interview, writes the words all with someone who has just lost everything.
Multi Country Content and Media Manager, Majdi Samaan, who is Palestinian and based in Türkiye, goes wherever the need is greatest, moving from one emergency to the next. He has learned that every crisis has the same centre.
“Wherever I land, it is the same. There is a person who did not choose any of this, and there is me, asking them to trust me with the worst day of their life. I know that trust from both sides of the camera.”
That trust can last years. In Syria, Media Officer Nour Halimah has photographed some of the same families since the early days of the war.
“I met her in 2019 in a shelter, pregnant and afraid. Years later I went back and photographed her children, healthy and growing, and she remembered me. What we do behind the lens is never just a task. Nothing about these families became less real because the world looked away. They are still here, and I am still here to prove it.”
Rahmat Nabi Shirzad, Media & Communication Coordinator for Islamic Relief Afghanistan,thinks about everything a photo leaves out.
“A photograph can show a woman standing sure of herself in her shop. It cannot tell you she supports eight people at home, or that running the only women’s shop in her village changed how she sees herself. It cannot show the weight she carries, or the hope she now holds for her family. My job is to keep the story behind the picture alive, so the world sees who she is and not only the help she was given.”
Media and Fundraising Coordinator, Hiba Ben Abdennabi, in Albania, put it better than anyone.
“There is a great weight in holding all of it inside a single frame. A photograph carries nothing more than pixels and soundwaves, and yet it has to dignify the person in front of me, carry their honest feelings to someone who will never meet them, and stand for everyone whose work put the aid in their hands. I am the eyes of the donor in the field.
People imagine our work as disaster. What they do not expect is the hope. When a child opens a gift and forgets, for a second, everything that is hard, I try to catch it. It is the least I can do to honour the gratitude they ask me to carry home: this is because of you, because you did not look away.”
A frame lasts a second on someone’s screen. Everything behind it stays with the person who captured it.
Their loyalty is to the family in front of the lens, and in portraying that family to you as people rather than numbers.
This World Humanitarian Day, stand with the people in these photographs, and with our colleagues who so beautifully bring their stories to you.
