Afghan Abdulfahim Zahiri chooses McDonalds and the nearby mall ? “Where we find everything” , the Ravalet castle ? “Who is so pretty”, the train station ? “Where we all arrive, where the path stops because it is a terminus”.
Bangladeshi Fahim Ahmed has opted for Roule mountain, Collignon beach ? “Because she is beautiful and so long” and a soccer field; others – they come from China, Guinea, Algeria, Mali and Kyrgyzstan, have set their sights on a street, a park, a bus station …
Photographic awakening
Their common point is to be migrants, to have failed at the end of the Cotentin, to Cherbourg, and to participate in a photographic awakening that allows them to take a different look at this city that they have learned to love.
The idea for this workshop came from the Itinérance association, which made a point of providing assistance to these lost at the end of the world, regularized or waiting to be. The humanitarian organization has come to an agreement with Le Point du Jour, a local art center focused on photography and publishing, to launch this initiative supported by the Ministry of Culture, within the framework of its program “Entre les images “, via the Diagonale network.
Fallen in love with the city
? “The photo is a more universal and more open language than the language”, notes Anne Gilles, the public manager at Point du Jour. ? “I wanted to institute a slightly different, more experimental way of producing images, of getting out of my posture as a photographer, of looking less at asylum seekers as subjects, but of working with them”, sums up Alexandre Guirkinger, Parisian photographer and former Magnum agency.
Having come to spend two weeks in residence in Cherbourg to pilot the project, he has worked for years on these migration issues. For the Rencontres photographiques d’Arles, he set about studying the Maginot Line as a border in images, before spending two years in Limousin immortalizing migrants. ? “Who had only one desire: to get involved. Here in Cherbourg, they plan to make their living. They fell in love with this city. “
Outdoor Expo
Alexandre Guirkinger takes his 20×25 chamber with them there, a sophisticated device that produces beautiful black and white plaques of the places they have chosen: the first that marked them on their arrival, the one where they like to walk, the one where they play sports, the one where they live …
Abdulfahim opens his eyes wide: ? “It allows me to open up to the outside world, to meet people, to soak up the French that I understand but do not speak. “ ? “Alexandre asked me what I like here, returns Fahim, I now have the chance to be able to photograph these places with a wonderful teacher… ”
This work, once completed, will give rise to an outdoor exhibition in Cherbourg, as well as a publication, and will visit other cities. A roundabout way of continuing their journey, for these not so strange foreigners from Prévert’s magnificent poem.
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