commitment

I was born a traveler. It was the gift granted me. A humanist by religion, for 15 years I identified with the suffering and injustices of my injured humanity. As a unique child, I lived in an imaginary world until I was 9 years old, where the image occupied a central space. My identity – torn apart by divorced parents, so culturally different – could not structure itself. Therefore, at 20, I decided to conquer the world. My initiation to travel started in Central America, where I spent one year. My attachment to this part of the world has always been vivid. Upon my return, I discovered photography in 1983 in Arles with Eikoh Hosoe and Guy Le Querrec. There, I found a perfect medium that could match traveling, telling stories, directly expressing emotions, and pursuing my quest for Truth. “Emotion is a brisk fall from consciousness to the world of magic,” said Sartre. Fifteen days later, I left for Princeton, where I became a photo assistant. A year after that, I was accepted to ICP, the photography school in New York founded by C. Capa, and constructed my first photo-essays.

I plunged into the lives of others with a Nikon F and an insolent ease, making their lives my cause. I was afraid of nothing and developing a career. Photojournalism became a passion which drove me to the box seats of history. I witnessed it with faith, attacking perilous and taboo subjects: incest, sexual abuse, the death penalty, slavery. This humanity humiliated suffered more than any other. But I was changing nothing except my own consciousness.

There was also war: Ex-Yugoslavia, its horror like the rape; a war crime, Palestine, Bucharest 89, visible and less visible massacres, the Rwanda – Zaire border in July 94. I was haunted by these climates, which resonate still, repressed but not evacuated from memory. I questioned the need for risk, and the meaning of the image manipulated by the media. I had lost my blind faith.

Thus pushed by the harshness of my colleagues and by emotional saturation, I left the agency in 1995 so to distance myself from the factual. I left the press for good in 2000 and allowed myself the time for the scaring over and healing of my soul. Through all this, the artist in me was born.

Corbis