possessions

Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing their war torn countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, bringing very few possessions with them as they make their dangerous -- and often deadly -- journeys toward what they hope is a better life.

The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization, commissioned photographer Tyler Jump to shoot a series of photos to document what refugees brought across the Aegean Sea to Lesbos, Greece.

You can tell a lot about people from looking at the things they value. A new project called "What We Really Value" offers a glimpse into the lives of people around the world through images of their single most prized possessions.

How much can you tell about a person from the small items they carry around every day? Do they provide a more comprehensive picture of who a person is? Atlanta photographer Jason Travis explores this question in his project Persona.

It's a series of diptych in which the top half of each image is a portrait of a subject, and the bottom half is a photo of that person's essential everyday items.

How much can you learn about a person by simply looking at things he or she has owned in their life? This question was explored a couple of years ago in a project that documented the things people would save from a burning house, and it's also the question behind photographer Camilla Catrambone's project titled, "Portraits of My Family."

Earlier this year, we featured a project by photographer Sannah Kvist that showed portraits of urban young people posing next to a pile of all their worldly possessions. Jiadang (Family Stuff) by Chinese photographer Huang Qingjun is similar in concept, but very different in content. He has spent nearly a decade traveling around to various rural communities in China, asking families to take everything they owned and carefully arrange them outdoors for a picture.

The Pink & Blue Project by South Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon started seven years ago after she photographed a portrait of her 5-year-old daughter sitting next to her beloved pink possessions. She then began creating portraits of other girls who loved pink things, and then other boys who loved blue.

For her project titled All I Own, photographer Sannah Kvist asked her friends to pile up all of their belongings into the corner of a room and then pose with the pile for a photo. The portrait subjects are all Swedish young adults that were born in the 1980s.