
Odyssées
- Publisher
- Filigranes Éditions / Prix Caritas Photo Sociale
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN
- 978-2-35046-514-2
- Specifications
- softcover
240 x 300 mm
64 pages
40 colour photographs
French
winner of the Prix Caritas Photo Sociale
co-produced with Prix Caritas Photo Sociale
Homer's epic tells the story of a return that never ends: Ulysses' return to Ithaca after twenty long years of absence. This work is an echo of that original travel narrative. "I followed several people in a situation of exile, asylum seekers or refugees, most often waiting for a status. Most of them live in accommodation centres while awaiting the administration's reply. The wait is often long and painful. It isolates them from reality and shuts them in a suspended mental space. Through this succession of portraits and landscapes, I wanted to create a correspondence between their inner life and the landscapes in which these people move, to make this feeling of exile perceptible. I photographed them in their places of life, in their daily though precarious and temporary territory. Their gazes are lost through windows. They are blurred. They often rely on the sky, whose azure seems to ignore them. The sea is the refuge of their inner life, of their hopes and promises; it is the physical reality of the distance travelled, which they often crossed to arrive here, and of remoteness." All suffer from uprooting and from anxiety about their future. This work on exile was made in the city of Le Havre.