The Teresa Rehabilitation Centre in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, is a rehabilitation centre run by local and international staff of the Italian Emergency NGO.
In the centre, prostheses of any type are built to measure, and patients are followed in their path of learning the use of prosthetics. Specialized staff, who for years now works for the NGO, follow the patients step by step. People come from all over the Iraq and beyond, to be helped. Specifically, when I took these pictures, all the people came from Mosul.
Children, women, elderly and some young soldiers of the Iraqi army live together for several days, inside the guest house in the centre, waiting for the doctor to be helped and to come back home, to a new life. Once a year, several workshops are held in the centre to help patients reintegrate into society. Once the seminars are finished, Emergency helps patients to find a store near their home, and by financing the opening and the first months of work, in order to provide sustenance and practical help. ReHUB is an ongoing project, which I will finish in the next few months on my next return to Iraq, and which will also include a visit to Mosul and the refugee camps of the war in Syria.
About Alessandro Annunziata
Alessandro Annunziata is an Italian freelance photographer, based in Milan. “Humans first” is his motto. Born in 1981, he studied and worked for years in tourism and international organizations, traveling the world, encountering a lot of different cultures and peoples. He lived in several countries in Europe, than in Australia, Madagascar and Sudan above all, travelling the world. Curious by nature, and with a strong sensitivity for the human being and his emotions, it is surely with his passion for travel and for people, who begins to approach photography. Self-taught, he begun to work first for events and sports, always trying to capture the emotions of those who enter the lens of his camera. In 2016 he found himself in Istanbul during the coup attempt, and it is there that he started thinking about photography as a possible job. He returned several times to Turkey, where he is became passionate about the Kurdish question. In 2018 he published a reportage on the Newroz in Diyarbakir.
After completing a master’s degree in reportage photography, he is currently following a master’s degree in photojournalism. Always attentive to the international political scene, and passionate about documentary, social and current events, he follows the situation of refugees and migrations in Europe, and in the Middle East. In 2018, two photos of migrants during a disembarkation in Palermo are selected by an international jury to become part of the “Per Amore” exhibition by UNHCR Italia. He became an official Ironman photographer, for which he shoots a black and white report entitled “Road To Kona”, and follows sports events as freelancers. In 2019 he is planning to come back to Iraq to finish is project “ReHUB”, and to continue with other projects related mainly to refugees, returning to Turkey at least a couple of time. He’s collaborating, as freelance, with different press agencies and directly with international organizations. His goal is to become a staff photographer for big press agencies or to become part of a collective of photojournalists with whom to collaborate actively, moving mainly to Africa and the Middle East. [Official Website]
