VOYAGEZ ICI
Love of a mom
Like every morning for months ...
... I participated in the assembly of the street clinic. We unrolled plastics on which a little later hundreds of patients would queue to receive free care. Tirelessly for months I had rolled cotton balls, held blankets to create a minimum of privacy during delicate treatments. Regularly, I went to accompany patients in the private clinics with which Jack had made agreements. I took all the tasks with the greatest seriousness, filled with the feeling that my role was important in this human chain. Jack always came in first and left after everyone else, this unauthorized clinic had to be cleared, swept away, wiped out every night.
The days are long, hot. Little by little, I started to treat wounds. On my knees, or sitting on a tin can, I found myself in the midst of an incessant flow of patients whom we had to treat. Despite the more than summary conditions, no one would have had the idea to complain. We were faced with patients who had waited in pain for hours, days, for care that they could not have obtained elsewhere given their status as miserable.
In my backpack, rolled in a terry cloth, I had my camera. Sometimes, during the day, I would take it out and capture those moments ...
A bit of Calcutta's memory
From 1987 until today, I have not stopped apprehending the city of Calcutta. I, who am not a big walker, the goal of meeting, discovering this incredible and confusing city pushed me to cross it dozens of times, camera in hand. Yes I know her. But can we know it, it so excessive, so rebellious, so exploded? At all hours of the day and night, I listened to its vibrations, its life and death energies. I went up to the top of the Howrah bridge (subject to the prohibition to be photographed) to immortalize its Dantesque structure. I wandered the city in the shadow of the leper beggars on the road to their pleas. I smoked the chilum on the banks of the Ganges to be accepted by the Sadhus on their journey to the end of reincarnation. I sat in the living room of Mr. BK Birla, owner of the Ambassador factories, among others, to understand the last pulsations of the legendary car. With 160,000 photos of the city and its inhabitants, would I have become a photographic memory without even realizing it? If I had photographed London or New York with the same intensity, I would undoubtedly have managed to publicize my work with more force. With Calcutta, the Princess in rags, I just manage to write a photographic testimony. . But for me it remains to me as if stuck to the skin. It is a piece of my destiny.
