 This is a great thrill to be here, especially when I'll be presenting some news stories which I haven't really talked about before. So let's begin here. This picture was taken one hour after Obama first announced he's running for president. I remember I think it was February because it was close to Valentine's Day and I said to him, Mr Obama I have a Valentine's message for you from my mother. She thinks you are a fantastic guy and she hopes you make it to the White House. So he leaned forward and he said, tell your mama. I said hi. But that's not the real Obama is it. This next picture is the real Obama. He's much more cautious than we expected. He likes to weigh up all the options before he makes a decision. And I remember on his desk he was reading a self-help book at the time. And it was a big book. It was called Be Quiet, Be Heard. How to raise delicate issues with an opponent and still find some common ground. Essentially how to compromise. Very interesting. So let's get back to Valentine's Day, shall we? After I did this picture a few years later around Valentine's Day there was this guy and he lived in San Diego. He was married. They had two children, twins, a boy and a girl. They were very poor. So it was Valentine's Day and he wanted to get his wife some flowers. He realised that if he bought a $5 bunch of flowers probably his two kids would have to go without food for a day. So what did he do? He went to a local deli and he stole a bouquet of $5 flowers. They caught him, called the police. Police arrived, looked at his papers and discovered that he's undocumented. So they make immediate proceedings to take him to the border to deport him. Now he didn't have a chance to call his wife, he didn't have a cell phone. So he panicked. There's the emotional trauma of being separated from your family without them knowing what's going on. But there's also, if he's the breadwinner, his wife and two children are going to be put into an emergency mode. So there was a struggle at the border and he panicked as they handcuffed him. And they tazered him. And they tazered him again and again and again until he had a stroke. And then he died two days later. So I teamed up with Human Rights Watch and my own foundation, the People's Portfolio, and we went back to tell some of these stories and I found the wife in San Diego and I asked her if she would take me to the spot where her husband was tazered by the border. We arrived there, she was a very brave lady and we brought her two kids along because she didn't have a babysitter and the two kids were playing with a ball in the background. And I thought, wouldn't it be powerful if I could have the two children in the picture too to photograph the wife at this powerful spot? And this is the picture. As soon as the two children got close to the spot where their father died, the dynamic changed and they needed reassurance from their mother. Now their mother could no longer pose for a picture showing pain or even defiance. She was distracted by her role as mother to nurture and protect her children. So she looks down, she's no longer looking at me and she's protecting her kids who feel very vulnerable. And there's only one person in this picture who's looking at us and that's the father who's passed away. This is a bus called the Freedom Bus and there's an organisation called Puente who drive this bus around America and they ask undocumented people and workers to come out from the shadows and tell their stories and they collect this sort of bank of storytelling. I saw this lady at a demonstration in Phoenix, Arizona and her husband had recently been deported. Now this is when she was pregnant. Now we think of mother and child as a universal image of positivity and tenderness but what happens when the mother has all her platform of support taken away from her and when the baby was born the father was not there, he's still away. This is a shrine. This is in Tijuana and we crossed the border and I found this shrine in a shelter and what happens is before someone makes a very dangerous crossing illegally into America they leave little gifts as a prayer to the Virgin Mary for good luck. What else have we got? Aha. So these ladies were in Nogales in a women's shelter. Now they've just been deported and they have no friends, no connections here, no money and they have three days to stay in the shelter before they're asked to leave because there's so many other people that need the space and you see the sense of being lost on their faces. This man is in Nogales and he's contemplating crossing over illegally into America so you feel that he's planning a very dangerous journey and then there's this lady who is a nun and she prays for his salvation. She prays that he's going to make it okay. I'm not very good with statistics I'm not really qualified to tell you all the ins and outs of the science of the situation. I'm a human person and I discover my stories from the street but I'll tell you what little I know from meeting all these incredible people that around 2001 the American government changed their policy and they decided to militarise most of the safe places along the border hoping that the places that are left where there's no military presence are the most dangerous places on the planet to cross because it's arid, really hot, rocky desert and they thought that that would be a great deterrent and surely no one is going to cross through those areas but what they didn't understand is that for a lot of people who cross the border illegally they're not doing it out of choice. In many cases it's a question of survival for them or their family members. A lot of people are escaping persecution a lot of people are running from gang violence or drug related violence. In some cases it's abject poverty if there's a mother and she can't feed her children in Mexico what does she do? Does she break a law to feed her children? Would you? I probably would break a law if my children were starving and I had to do something to keep them alive. So what they do is in many cases they'll give their children to a family member to look after and they will cross the border and try and get a job as a cleaner or a fruit picker or something so what happens if they cross the desert and they don't make it? They end up here. This is a morg in Phoenix. Now I was told that the desert gets 115 degrees at its worst. When they go across the border it's normally in a group of maybe 15, 20 people with a smuggler and the smuggler tells them to bring just two gallons of water. Now within a few hours in that kind of heat so many people are completely unprepared and that's why on average there are about 450 deaths each year going through these difficult areas in the desert. Now when you die in the desert within 45 minutes your body begins to decompose. Within two or three hours your body is unrecognisable. So it shows you the difficult terrain that people are in. And of course when you do die in the desert you're essentially a missing person because unless they find and identify the body your family members don't know what happened to you. So you're left with this terrible question of what happened to our loved one. So there's a lady she's an amazing lady, her name's Robin Robin Reineke. This is her. She runs a thing called the Missing Migrants Project and her job is to go through all the bodies that come in and to take all the personal belongings that people had on their possession at the time when they died and try and create a file of information and then she matches that file of information with a missing persons file and sees if she can match it and then she somehow helps the families by bringing a sense of closure to their tragedy of someone who's gone missing. Now she's holding a lot of these plastic bags filled with personal belongings that people give. Often it's very simple things. Now you have to remember that these things were found on decomposed bodies and I'll never forget the stench of death. It was horrible. I've not been exposed to this kind of thing before and I remember holding some of these bags and I remember the smell got into my fingers and it stayed there for about a month, freaked me out. This is all that was found on this man's body. A phone, three coins and a chain for good luck in your travels. Then add a few more. There's a comb on this person's body. This one there's a few pictures of his family, two identity cards, a phone, a watch and a brush. And then it goes on and on. Each one of these is somebody's life. I call this kind of like a washing line of the dead. Now let's look at one in particular because it's the details that can be quite haunting. And I remember as I was focusing on this through my lens I noticed the watch was still ticking. So let's talk about this lady. Her name is Femina. So she was very poor. She had a son, Carlos. He was 13 years old and they were starving. So she decided to do the most courageous thing. Leave her role as direct mother, but to be a provider. So she left her son with her family members. I think it was her sister. And she crossed the very dangerous borders. Went into America and got a job as a cleaner. And the idea was to send money back to her son for support. Now her son missed his mum so much. And he would write letters to her saying I'm going to come and see you. I'm going to come to America. I'm starting to run. I'm building up my strength so I'll be ready for the desert. And she kept saying don't come. I want you to stay there because it's so unsafe. One day he found out in his neighbourhood that there was another lady that was prepared to go across the border illegally and she was prepared to take him with her. So they found a smuggler. There was a team of again about 15 people who were crossing the border. And as they went through this dangerous part of the desert the lady that he was with who is essentially his surrogate mother now she started showing signs of dehydration. Now when you're a third of the way into the journey and you start showing those signs the smuggler recognises this and he knew that she's going to slow down the rest of the group and it's very unlikely that she's going to survive this big journey ahead. What they did was as she got weaker and weaker they sat her under a tree and they told the little boy to leave her so they'd keep on going. But the little boy had already lost one mother and he was never going to lose this mother again so he decided to stay to keep her company and the group left him in the desert and he died. Robin, the lady I just showed you who runs a missing persons organisation she had just identified the little boy's body and when I did this picture it was about a week later so Fominia was still in a terrible state of shock that she'd just found out her son died and I remember if you look here this is a little toy guitar she'd bought her son and it was just there in the room and she always thought it would be so nice to give him that guitar when he makes it to America one day and we're united. So she breaks down in tears as she holds the only picture she has of him in a frame and I remember taking one frame and then I put the camera down and I gave her a hug and the tears that she cried were not Hollywood tears it's not like what you see on TV this was visceral this was like an animal mortally wounded it was a groan and I'll never forget the vibrations of that groan going through my body it still haunts me to today this is Mike Wilson what he does, he's a Native American it's one of the most deadliest places on the planet so what he does is he leaves water out for all the migrants crossing so there's just a chance that it might keep them alive till they make it across the border and I asked him tell me about what water means to you and he said water is salvation water is survival and then I asked him something and I'd like to read it to you because it was quite amazing what he said I said how do you know the difference between right and wrong if you're doing this you're kind of helping people who are committing a crime and a lot of people in America would find that a problem so he said you may ask why are you abetting and aiding criminals it's a universal human rights question I have to choose between two sets of laws federal immigration laws and a higher immigration law and a higher moral universal law I would love to honour and obey the federal immigration law but people are dying in my desert and I humbly believe in the tradition of hospitality ok so let's talk about these ladies this lady here her name is Alina one of the most beautiful incredible women I've ever met in my life she used to be undocumented she's now a US citizen she's an activist now and what she does is she campaigns so intensely for these ladies rights because they're all fruit pickers in upstate New York and all these ladies are undocumented in fact I heard a statistic I don't know if it's true that almost half the fruit pickers are undocumented so of course if you're undocumented you're living in the shadows of the law and you're not protected there are many rules and regulations so you're very vulnerable to abuse and a lot of these ladies suffer terrible abuses sexual abuse, violence and they can't complain to anybody because then they'll be deported and on top of that I remember my friends at Human Rights Watch when I produced this picture they were a little nervous about these two ladies being shown because there was a sort of connotation that because they're wearing these bandanas over their faces they look slightly aggressive and menacing perhaps they might even be bandits or even terrorists or something and they didn't want that association made with these very courageous ladies but the truth couldn't be far more different I mean they're wearing these handkerchiefs because they're supposed to be given gloves proper protection with their clothes and proper masks to protect them from these pesticides these poisons on the fruit they're not given anything so this is the only protection they have and if you think they're slightly threatening or menacing think again these ladies are so vulnerable and notice this lady she was wearing a t-shirt said some girls have all the fun so let's talk about Alina I asked her a question I said tell me about courage she said courage is the ability is not the ability to jump from a plane with a parachute it's being able to stand this life this hard life day after day still having hopes and dreams not giving up and thinking that someday you're going to have the power to express what you think without feeling fear sounds a bit like what happened in Paris and then I said Alina what do you hope for and she said I hope to die in my bed and she starts to cry I hope to die in my bed seeing finally justice for these women I hope to die surrounded by all my women telling me we have rights now we have drinking water in our fields we have a bathroom they pay us fair they don't rape us they don't poison us with pesticides we can speak out without fear we can walk and nobody is going to arrest us because we are a different colour that is what I hope for and I'm going to end by reading you a little letter that Robin wrote me, the lady who's holding all the possessions Dear Platon this is when she saw my picture I have never had an experience quite like seeing your photo of me it's hard to put into words but when I see that photo it inspires me to be gentle with myself and to provide some of the tenderness to myself that I give freely to others it also reminds me of the young optimistic naive girl I was when I began the work and how the work has transformed me both into someone I'm proud of and also into someone who is hurt and exhausted the deep tragedy of our border is matched with equal beauty in addition to knowing that the work is on the right side of history I get to meet and help some incredible beautiful people there is such human tenderness in the world's darkest places and without going there you never find the truest of hearts thank you for listening