Philippe GABEL
This post is also available in: French
«L’absurde nait de la confrontation entre l’appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde»
Philippe Gabel
LOST VOICES OF THE STREET
During my urban wanderings, I have been struck time and again by those excluded from society, suffering on our streets. The sense of unease, powerlessness and sadness they created in me drove me to get closer to them. To get closer to these people beaten down by society, those whom alcohol, cold, sickness, depression, drugs and loneliness draw together like recumbent statues at the feet of our buildings. To engage with these fragile survivors, many gifted with an almost animal-like talent for blending in with the background to protect themselves against the assaults of climate and man, and the blank unseeing look of the other. I hope these photographs will challenge us. They show us these men and women, our peers, who have become invisible, so frightening and disturbing is that marginality that could tomorrow be our own lot”. These photos bear witness to and denounce the appalling disgrace of our society – capable of sacrificing the excluded, the « Homeless ». To ignore the other, is it not equivalent to doing him violence and, in the end, killing him? This other, unable to shake himself out of his misery, ignores himself to the point of living life as a long suicide. But this other, is it not us? Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus wrote: « The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. » Philippe Gabel