Julius Matuschik and Sebastian Cunitz were photojournalism students in Hanover when they travelled to Aachen to photograph refugees living in a converted hotel near the German border. The conditions were adequate but the atmosphere was intensely isolating — no schools, no jobs, nothing to do. They found they could not transport everything they felt and saw and heard in photographs alone. That is when some of the young boys said: we can write letters to you. The idea for Cameo was born from that offer.
The first issue, published through what became Cameo Kollektiv e.V. in Hanover, featured those letters alongside stark photography from Hotel Aachen — intimate, anonymous portraits of boys who had made the passage to Europe alone, because the route was deemed too dangerous for girls. The second issue documented a converted cloister in southern Germany and explored the theme of hospitality: Germany’s culture of welcoming and the deep-rooted religious traditions behind it. By the third issue, Cameo Ankommen, the project had grown into an interactive magazine involving more than seventy people with roots in twenty-six different nations, printed in five languages in a run of 10,000 copies.
The Kollektiv quickly expanded beyond print. Workshops at refugee shelters run by Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe brought together people from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Tibet, Eritrea, and Germany for intensive encounters with strangers — exercises in questioning prejudice, adopting different perspectives, and discovering what integration might actually look like from the inside. An interactive exhibition, Learning to See — I See Myself Through You, grew out of these encounters. Panel discussions on the media coverage of Islam in Germany followed at the Lumix Festival for young photojournalism.
Cameo was never a magazine about refugees. It was a magazine with them — and with everyone willing to sit down and make something together. The editorial structure left every decision about form and content to the individual contributor, which gave each issue a genuinely democratic character: messy, unpredictable, and often beautiful, like the process of cultural exchange itself.
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