Laureates of the 7th edition of the SOPHOT.com Contest

EXTRA/ordinaire

It is a huge building, far away from any urban area, a maze of corridors punctuated by big bay windows. This is where forty-five patients are housed, along with more than a hundred staff. Doctors, nurses, and auxiliaries take care of the residents, all suffering from degenerative neuromuscular disease: some have arrived recently, while others have been there for more than twenty years…
The careers move around the thousand meters of corridors by bicycle; the residents, in their bespoke electric wheelchairs, go calmly about their business. Each of them has his own room, his cocoon, his universe; a distillation of images, memories and of passions. One is struck by the silence, as the illness and its slow evolution make speech difficult. All are dependent and all know how it is going to end up. It is a world apart, where the notion of time and space is distorted and transformed: compressed one moment, distended the next.
Produced within the confines of their rooms, this photographic representation is first and foremost the expression of an uncovered passion, of a hidden truth or just of a simple desire. Once developed, it occupies all of the physical space in the room; it becomes so overwhelming that it ends up creating a vision where imagination and illusion supplant the tangible and the reality of the human condition.
The black and white photographs of this documentary were produced over three years. They help to give a context to the daily life in the residence and the conditions in which the portraits were made.