Homer’s Odyssey tells the story of a never-ending comeback. The return of Odysseus to Ithaca after twenty long years of absence. This work is an echo of this original travelogue. “I have followed several people in exile, asylum seekers or refugees, most often awaiting status. Most of them are living in shelters pending the administration’s response. The wait is often long and painful. It isolates them from reality and encloses them in a mental space in suspense. Through this succession of portraits and landscapes, I wanted to create a correspondence between their interiority and the landscapes in which these people live in order to make this feeling of exile perceptible. I photographed them in their places of life, in their daily territory although it was precarious and temporary. Their eyes are lost through the windows. They are in the dark. They often rely on the sky, the azure of which seems to ignore them. The sea is the refuge of their interiority, their hopes and their promises. It is the physical reality of the distance traveled – often they have crossed it to get here – and the distance. ” They all suffer from uprooting and worry about their future.
This photographic work on exile was carried out in the city of Le Havre.