Les mauvaises herbes (”The Weeds”) is a documentary photographic work created in collaboration with the Phyto-Victimes association which questions the responsibility of pesticides in the health and ecological problems affecting France and, more generally, the planet.

I take the time to listen to the stories of these farmers, men and women, their journeys, their difficulties and sometimes their intimacy. This corpus of images and of snippets of sentences progressively builds a contemporary story of women and men which the state and multinational corporations try to solve in silence. I would like to make known the story of these victims, the story of these weeds.

Through this project, I also try to question the relationship maintained by these women and men with a nature which made them sick, a nature there was a break with. My images seek to challenge the viewer and to push him to question himself about the current agricultural model and the fantasized image he has of it. These images of fields which are bucolic and sweetened, come in contrast to portraits which are sometimes hard, and whose underlying story is difficult. Do not they reflect the health and economic crisis affecting French farmers today?

It’s in this way I’m trying to answer the problematic I was asking myself for a long time: how to photograph the invisible?

Born in 1997 in Muret, Anaïs Ondet graduated from the École supérieure de photographie & de game design in Toulouse in 2018 with the Special Award of the jury, and continues her Master’s degree studies in family photography and memory at the Université Montpellier 3. She lives and works in Toulouse.