This post is also available in: French

“Living is what we all have in common. Whether we are nomadic or sedentary, we all live. The temporary shelters of migrant populations mirror their personality, just as our apartments and our houses speak about us. It’s from this common point that I aim to lead the public to identify themselves, to put themselves in the place of the other when observing his living place. And it’s exactly to enable the public to project themselves that I firstly take pictures of these places without their inhabitants. Next, it’s the turn of portraits of their occupants. Taken on a gray background, these images reveal faces of these men and women in a very sober way. This studio technique makes it possible to highlight the model by dissociating the person from the context: it’s no longer the image of a migrant walking in the mud among tents but the face of somebody looking like him. The face of a woman or a man looking at me. The interviews that I carry out with migrant people are focused on the habitat: the house they had left behind, their various shelters throughout their journey and finally, the accommodation they would like to obtain once their destination reached. By evoking their successive homes, my characters tell me about their life, their journey and their dream of the future.” – Bruno Fert

Since 2016, Bruno Fert has been travelling across refugee camps of Greece, Italy and France to photograph temporary accommodations – makeshift shelters, rooms, apartments – where those who had fled their country are recreating an intimacy, a bond, an identity. An exceptional documentary work, witnessing of this pivotal moment of exile where the reconstruction of oneself requires the appropriation of one’s own interior.