Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

Another photograph shows a family cowering on the boardwalk as a
pair of disorientated recent arrivals, still dripping wet, stumble along the
pavement. One of the most disturbing images though shows the hands
of a cemetry worker hammering a plaque inot place on a concrete coffin.
The plaque simply reads. ‘Immigrant No. 3’.
It is true that some of Medina’s images are little more than piles of dead
bodies on the Canary Islands’ rocky shore. But the photographs that
really define his style are more biting confrontations, which seem to
ask the viewer, ‘What would you do in this situation?’ They make their
audience wonder what role we might unwittingly play in this mass exodus.
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Medina looks closely at what happens when the immigrants are caught
and ‘processed’. He asks questions about who handles them – the
military or an aid agency – and if they are taken to mainland Spain or a
holding centre in West Africa and how they are treated.
The route from Mauritania’s coast to the Canary Islands is a relatively
new one (in 2007, ed.) for illegal African migration. The traditional
passage has been to cross the narrow Straits of Gibraltar between
Tangier and the coastal cities of southern Spain. However, as security
steadily increases along that border much of Africa’s illegal traffic has
moved to the Mauritanian coast.
Many of Medina’s images illustrate the number of deadly obstacles
plaguing the trip. there are bodies strewn against the sharp volcanic
rocks that define the Canary Islands’ coastline and migrants struggling to
escape their capsized and overcrowded boats.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 17