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.