20 Most Powerful Photographs Ever Taken : #15

Erik Refner captured one of the most mournful moment ina refugee camp close to Peshawar, near the Afghan border. A one-year-old boy had died in the camp after death dehydrated.

“There is the strong contrast between the white cloth and the dark arms. The child looks like he has a little smile around his mouth - as if he has finally gone to a better place…Then there is the fact that it is old people burying a young child - it should be the other way around. There is a lot of symbolism in that picture. All these things make it very powerful…” 

He went into the tent where the male members of the family had started to prepare the child’s body for burial according to Muslim tradition. 

“I briefly paid my condolences to the father, than I asked him if it was okay for me to take the pictures. According to tradition, it is the men who prepare the body. In this case, it was the child’s father, his brother and an imam. Those are the arms that you can see in the picture. Everything happened very quickly - the ceremony took around 10 minutes. I was sitting on the ground shooting pictures and then taking them from above. It was a difficult situation - there was a lot of sadness.”