SERRALONGUE, Bruno
Calais. Témoigner de la « Jungle » / Testimonies from the ‘Jungle’, 2006–2020

Un livre qui rassemble l’intégralité des photographies réalisées par Bruno Serralongue à Calais sur une période de 15 ans, documentant les conditions de vie des réfugié·es tentant de franchir la Manche pour se rendre en Angleterre. Depuis la fermeture du camp de Sangatte en 2002, les réfugié·es errent dans la ville de Calais et ses environs, dormant dans des abris de fortune et survivant grâce aux bénévoles des associations. Le livre associe les photographies à des textes de Jacques Rancière et de Florian Ebner – commissaire d’une exposition du même titre au Centre Pompidou en 2019 – qui les mettent en perspective dans leurs dimensions esthétique et politique.

Textes en français et en anglais / Texts in French & English

Between 2006 and 2020, French photographer and artist Bruno Serralongue conducted a prolonged engagement with the community of refugees on their last stop in a long journey to reach England. The resulting photographs, which formed the basis for an exhibition at Centre Pompidou in 2019, are published here for the first time. Serralongue captured disparate moments in the lives of the exiles, their attempts to reach England and their provisional camps which were dismantled by the French government in 2020. Serralongue’s images employ a suspended temporality that contradicts the sensationalised images broadcast by the mass media; the slowness of his photography, a characteristic of working with a view camera, requires both a distance from, and a proximity with, the subjects photographed, achievable only due to a relationship of trust built with the inhabitants of the ‘Jungle’.

345 photographs from the Calais series are published here with texts by French philosopher Jacques Rancière and art historian Florian Ebner.

Published by Heni Publishing, 2022
Artists' Books / Photography / Politics