Just back from Kigali, Rwanda. I was working there for an ONG, for a photographic project whitch will be shown during the olympic games of Turin, Italy in 2006. I worked during a week with a group of children (Umwana) , all orphans, most of them HIV positive. The situation there still makes me trembling all over. The background and the politic situation sounds like a nightmare and doing a photographic series of portraits there can’t be exactly based on the same system. There’s some « pathos », the situation of the environement, the personal situation of each child makes the photographic project absolutly different, more psychologic, much more fragile and sensible. I did my best but I feel that the main problem for a photographer like me there is the post-colonialism. Let’s say that it’s complicated to make a series of portrait without thinking of the 19th century and its patronizing anthropological photographic project where the « nigger » was considered like an animal. I made a workshop with 15 teenagers there. They made their own portraits with my heavy equipment, had good fun. At the end of the workshop, they asked me where i was coming from. « Paris », I said. « Do you know what french did in our country? » they answered. Yes, I know.
